Analyzing Long-Term SSD Failure Rates 149
wintertargeter writes "It looks like Tom's Hardware has posted the first long-term study of SSD failure rates. The chart on the last page is interesting — based on numbers, it seems SSDs aren't more reliable than hard drives. "
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Whaddayamean "long term"? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're unlucky backups won't save you from this:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue [dslreports.com]
yesterday I spent over an hour fomatting, re-installing windows and everything else I needed.
Also updated windows fully, customized everything to my liking... in short, a good 2-3h of work.
This morning, I open up the laptop and surprise... EVERYTHING's back to the pre-format. I have no idea how this is even remotely possible.
OCZ is calling this the time warp issue, and is related to the sandforce controller...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/552728-fresh-os-install-ocz-ssd-r3.html [notebookreview.com]
any firmware before 1.29 can result in you experiencing what OCZ refers to as "Time Warp" (you lose all info stored on drive since last boot - happens at random). 1.29 decreases likelihood of this happening, but does not eliminate the possibility.
The big problem with this failure mode is the drive still appears to work. So if you are unlucky to not notice that the pricelist/tender document you are about to send or commit to is no longer showing the corrected figures/information, things could get way more painful than if your drive just didn't work (in which case work would just be delayed while you restore from backups, or if you have no backups you would just have to deal with the data loss).
Re:Baed on numbers... (Score:3, Interesting)
The most interesting part of the article for consideration with SSDs is that SMART is going to be near useless for them. Since most failures are random occurrences in electronics which SMART isn't good at detecting, we may need better technology for detecting SSD failures.
Have you ever seen SMART perform in a useful way on a mechanical disk? At work and at home, I've gone through a crap-ton of hard disks in the last decade or so that SMART's been prevalent and never have I seen SMART flag a drive as problematic before I already knew I had a serious problem. More often than not, I've had systems slow to a crawl due to massive numbers of read errors and sector reallocations while the drive firmware actively lied to me about the drive's condition. Only looking at the raw SMART stats and watching the counters increase wildly reveals the truth.