Power-Loss-Protected SSDs Tested: Only Intel S3500 Passes 293
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Soulskill
from the 95%-of-everything-is-crud dept.
from the 95%-of-everything-is-crud dept.
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.
SSD drives are fast, but they suck for reliability (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have important data don't store it on an SSD drive. I own decent size small company which ships lots of systems with the better drives (not Intel) with comparable user satisfaction ratings to Intels SSD drives and they certainly aren't that terribly reliable. They are much better than the junk SSD drives, but for real reliability stick with the 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM drives. Sadly the 7200 RPM drives are dead now. Nobody makes them for laptops. I guess the next best thing for speed + a little more reliability is Intel SSD.
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:UPS (Score:3, Interesting)
> Isn't this why god created UPS?
When my UPS battery starts going bad, the first sign is that it just cuts the power without warning. If you have a SSD, that could be the deathblow that sends your data bye-bye.
The bigger question, though, is WHY THE FUCK can't we either disable whole-drive encryption, or at least set it to a key WE control, with some means to read the bits from even a drive that's totally nonfunctional SATA-wise (JTAG, SPI, whatever) and reconstruct it offline? That's why I despise Sandforce so much. As if it's not bad ENOUGH that Sandforce-based drives can just die from a single corrupted write, they have to go a step further and make it impossible for end users to do any kind of meaningful data recovery. There's NO REASON why a corrupted SSD should require thousands of dollars of commercial data recovery. If they'd just give us some fucking way to rip the raw bits from the drive, document the data structures, and give us control over the encryption, a fucked up SSD would just be an annoyance.
Re:Consumer grade vs. Enterprise Grade (Score:4, Interesting)
A £100 budget was mentioned. I guess Intel was the only vendor that offered enterprise hardware below that.
The Intel 320 apparently delived good results as well, and that's not enterprise grade whatever that means anyway.
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never found a UPS useful. I used to buy them, but this always happened:
* Power went out
* UPS didn't quite come up in time
* Computer reset
* UPS now was happy to provide power for my computer to boot
I've tried very expensive and very cheap - they just don't work for computers in my experience, and the batteries need replacing every couple of years, and are difficult to dispose of.
Re:So make the power reliable... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stop Bragging! (Score:0, Interesting)