SSD failure rates?

[sadbuttrue]

There seems to be an alarmingly high number of failures reported on various forums. What bothers me is that when these SSDs fail (the controller as I understand it), one loses access to the drive and all data on it. Unlike most mechanical drive failures, this can happen with absolutely no warning.

Are there any statistics available for the current generation of SSDs?

[shaithis]

I was under the impression that SSD failure rates were extremely low......apart from people flashing dodgy firmwares anyway.

[saman_gh]

I was under the impression that SSD failure rates were extremely low......apart from people flashing dodgy firmwares anyway.

Indeed. I think that the failure rate for SSDs is much lower than hard disks, due to SSDs not being mechanical an all that. As shaithis noted, most failures are probably due to bad firmware/controller card, which I believe can happen with traditional hard disks as well.

I've been using my Samsung SSD for quite a while now, and haven't had any problems. I'm planning on getting another one in the summer, and RAID0-ing them together !

[Flewis]

Their performance decreases over time though don't they? Must get to a point where they become too slow eventually?

[saman_gh]

There are two two things that you must consider:

1. Yes, they may slow down very slight if heavily used. However, this is generally overcome by use of the new TRIM feature or by just zeroing out the SSD every couple of years.
2. All flash memory and SSDs have can be "wore down" by excessive writing. This is overcome by the "wear-leveling" feature of the controller, which aims to spread the writes to as many blocks/sectors as possible.
   
   Not sure about the exact numbers, but I think that Intel expects that writing 5Gb to a disk every day, a SSD should last more than 10 years (or was it 50 years?).

[shaithis]

Their performance decreases over time though don't they? Must get to a point where they become too slow eventually?

They can slow down.....there are a couple of ways around it though.

One is to not partition the entire drive....leave a bit of space (you don't need to leave much!) at the end of the drive....the other is using a drive and OS that supports the TRIM command.

Ideally, you would have both.

[sadbuttrue]

I've done some more googling, yet can't find any reports/statistics regarding ssd failure rates. I guess it's too early to tell. When we finally get below £1/gb I might jump on board with a raid 1 setup.

[Anastie]

I got my Intel X25 80GB when W7 was released here are the benchies at start and today. I have not upgraded to the latest firmware.

The benchmark shows a slow down in write speeds but not noticeable day to day.

As new


Today

[mikerr]

I've had an corsair X32 die on me after 2 months.

No warning - one day it just wasn't seen by the BIOS.

Didn't lose anything as I keep backups, but a bit disconcerting that it was so sudden. Seems not that unusual from reading corsair SSD forums...

Now moved to intel.