Power-Loss-Protected SSDs Tested: Only Intel S3500 Passes 293
lkcl writes "After the reports on SSD reliability and after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs, a degree of paranoia set in where I work. I was asked to carry out SSD analysis with some very specific criteria: budget below £100, size greater than 16Gbytes and Power-loss protection mandatory. This was almost an impossible task: after months of searching the shortlist was very short indeed. There was only one drive that survived the torturing: the Intel S3500. After more than 6,500 power-cycles over several days of heavy sustained random writes, not a single byte of data was lost. Crucial M4: failed. Toshiba THNSNH060GCS: failed. Innodisk 3MP SATA Slim: failed. OCZ: failed hard. Only the end-of-lifed Intel 320 and its newer replacement, the S3500, survived unscathed. The conclusion: if you care about data even when power could be unreliable, only buy Intel SSDs."
Relatedly, don't expect SSDs to become cheaper than HDDs any time soon.
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:2, Informative)
If you are good with electricity, and computer electrical needs are modest, one might be even better off by going with a solar panel setup, a couple sets of AGM solar batteries, a PSW inverter, and a MPPT charge controller. This wouldn't allow a 15 amp circuit to run at full throttle for long, but a computer that takes at most 200-400 watts (the new Mac Pro maxes at 480 watts), it would provide steady, clean power regardless of anything in the house.
Solar is cheap, so much that having a dedicated circuit is a step ahead of a UPS.
Re:SSD drives are fast, but they suck for reliabil (Score:4, Informative)
There's still one 720RPM laptop drive, I just bought a 1TB 7200RPM HGST drive recently...
That said one of the newer Seagate drives scored faster in a speed check. Not sure what to make of that.
Re: So make the power reliable... (Score:4, Informative)
Probably... (Score:2, Informative)
That it is losing data outside of the data being written.
Some SSDs are notorious for the firmware's block tables getting corrupted if they're suddenly powered off. Unlike a hard disk, what this means is they could potentially be writing under the assumption that the set of blocks they're reading/writing are meant for an entirely different set of sectors than they actually contain. IE massive data corruption because you're not getting back the data you're assuming you will. Due to the write limits of Flash, the SSDs are basically constantly shuffling the window of writable sectors in order to do 'wear levelling', which means if anything disrupts that process and they're using either old or new physical block locations with the old logical ones, your data may not be ending up as it should be.
Re:Original research (Score:2, Informative)
Re:what's the point of this? (Score:4, Informative)
HDDs, even the cheapest ones nowadays, allow the software to enforce the order in which pending data is written to safe permanent storage and software to known that pending data has indeed been safely committed to permanent storage.
The operative systems, file systems and applications build upon this to ensure that, in case of an unexpected crash, you don't end up with a corrupted file system or data. You may lose files created in the last 5 minutes, but you won't end up with a file system so corrupted that you need to re-install your computer.
Databases uses this to ensure that, once you've clicked "pay" in a e-commerce site, it will either record it properly or not at all, so you don't end up with half-way situations where you get charged and don't get the product you paid for or vice-versa.
According to reports like TFA and the article TFA was attempting to reproduce, a lot of cheap SSDs break this guarantees.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Informative)
The power loss protection on the Crucial M500 worked fine in my initial tests. It can't be taken seriously as a reliable drive because it doesn't have any SMART data on longevity. There's no way to know when the drive is wearing out, so it's pretty much useless for serious work. The one I bought for testing is in my laptop, it's a fine drive there. See Tech Report [techreport.com] for a review complaining about the missing SMART data, I'm not the only one who noticed.
Intel's data on wear is very good, see my look at the 320 vs. 710 lifetime [2ndquadrant.com] for example. The replacement models, DCS3500 and DCS3700, are even better drives in every way.