News - New reliability poll shows surprising SSD failure rate

[MrJim]

I've had an Intel X-25 G2 80Gb drive for three years now, with no problems whatsoever. I've recently bought a 256Gb Samsung 830 SSD, & hopefully it will prove equally reliable.

[MrBozack]

17% SSD failure is a worrying figure. I find this hard to believe, and quite possibly untrue. It makes you wonder what percentage of traditional HDD these guys broke.

12% of ZDNet's surveyed readers must be trying to insert floppy disks into it? Either that or they're running them in SATA II mode or using the wrong cable! Sure, some are going to be defective, but 17% across different manufacturers with different controllers? Sorry, but I call BS.

Perhaps I've just been very lucky, but the volumes I've seen have all behaved fantastic. SSD technology is far superior to HDD.

Oh and another thought; no wonder the PC industry is in decline when ZDNet be hatin' so much!

[dangel]

Two dead OCZ drives here - so I believe it.

Also I remember when intel bricked their gen 2 drives via a firmware 'update' which fortunately was fixed (but you lost all your data).

Does it happen? Yup!

[Malphas]

I don't believe these are actual drive failures, more likely to be flakey firmware or something. My M4, for instance, was hit with the 3160 hour bug (or however long it was) during its first year, but it wasn't a case of actual drive failure, or data loss, it was just a case of flashing new firmware. I don't think things like that should be counted as failures in the same way as actual data corruption/loss, but I don't think this poll made that distinction.

[ianp1966]

I'm on my third vertex 60gb drive and will probably look elsewhere when this one fails as i'm quite sure it will.

[Agent]

We had a massive number of OCZ failures at work. Simply staggering and makes the 17% failure rate look like bliss.

[shaithis]

Making me happy I have stayed away from the OCZ drives! and also explains why all the cheap refurbs are OCZ....

Stopped buying their RAM years ago because of how problematic it seemed to be.

[Noli]

@jimbobgod1969

Funny - me too (exact same drives, capacities and lengths of time!).

Also have a crucial 256gb C300 but it is awaiting a reason to use it. May be if I get a lappy soon, otherwise will stick it in my dad's laptop.

[killer7xx]

It's planned obsolescence from the manufacturers, they want you to buy more because of the cheap price.

[mikeo]

There are so many reasons that people have/had problems/issues with SSD's, or certain brands... and a lot of them are not necessarily the actual drives fault! While there have been a number of well documented issues with Sandforce based drives (and unluckily for some, they still have problems) but a fair few of the issues have been sorted by firmware updates. Also,at times people tend to forget that SSD's are still "relatively" new technology in the scheme of things. I also find the figure of 17% pretty unbelievable. In my own personal experience over 3+ years of SSD use, I've only had one genuine drive failure and that was a Crucial C300. My three Vertex drives have performed faultlessly and so have the 5 that I've fitted in colleagues laptops. Maybe I'm just lucky.

I await with interest to see the results of a more meaningful poll. Preferably with a much bigger sample size.

[MilkMan]

I've been using my Transcend SSD now for 4 months and no problems.
Despite the fact that it’s a SandForce controller.
However, I’m sure that a lot of SSD’s will use cheap materials just to have the “cheapest” price.

[pctech2012]

What are the specific issues with Sandforce controllers and which do you suggest in preference?

[MrNeil]

Im happy with my Mr Kingston as i got at a low low price indeed and im happy ,though it is my 1st SSD im impressed

[Agent]

What are the specific issues with Sandforce controllers and which do you suggest in preference?

This has been covered in endless threads over the last few months - have a search mate

[Tpyo]

Weren't there issues with firmware updates bricking certain (intel?) drives? Are people counting this kind of event, rather than a genuine hardware failure per se?

[k4p84]

Both my SSD's are Intel 520 series. Both a couple of months old are are doing fine.