News - New reliability poll shows surprising SSD failure rate

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ZDNet’s consumer survey says 17 per cent fail in the first 6 months.

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Never had any problems with my Crucial C300 64Gb, has anyone had any trouble with theirs?

I bet most of those were dodgy sandforce compatibility issues.

It was these sort of comments that caused me to research before purchasing an SSD. Having done so I purchased a Crucial M4. I've had no problems with it. Its just the usual thing when buying something important - Do a little research first!

I've owned 7 or 8 SSDs and have had one failure - a Crucial 256gb, a C300, IIRC - which was replaced under warranty. The majority of my purchases have been Crucial SSDs.

I've had far more trouble with mechanical disk failures than I have SSDs and I suspect shaithis could be right.

Have had a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe for a year now with no problems. It's been a really good purchase for me, as my first SSD.

For me, I've had two SSDs (Intel X25-M and a OCZ Vertex 2E) and zero failures. Hardly a good sample size though...

I've get an OCZ petrol 64gb that came dead on arrival then the shop replace and give an other one till now for the first 2 months no problems

17% ? Really ?
One M4 and one Sandforce. No worries with either for me.

I wonder if this is related to the number of new, non-HDD manufacturers getting involved in the disk drive market.

Most of the main players in the SSD market have never had a hard drive business before, they are memory and flash memory vendors traditionally. Do they really understand the market they have jumped into?

The only issues I can really remember with hard drives in recent years are either firmware (which was more related to compatibility than reliability) and a mechanical problem with motors, heads and platters. I can't think of a fundamental problem with drive controllers and circuit boards on hard drive crapping out on a large scale. To me, this is something the hard drive manufacturers have mastered over the past 30 years or s, where as the new breed of drive manufacturers and vendors still need to go through these issues. I guess the same goes for the controller manufacturers, do they really have the production and design experience required for such a critical component? An SSD or HDD is far more important than other components as it holds all our data. If a memory module, CPU, motherboard or graphics card dies, while it is an inconvenience you don't loose anything. If a drive craps out you are screwed if you don't have a backup.

HDDs have had their share of issues too. Seagate, IBM, Hitachi

Well with the three I've been using, a 60GB GSkill Falcon II in my HTPC (running since late 2009-ish), a 120GB Mushkin Callisto (Dec. 2010) and the 240GB Sandisk Extreme I've had no problems... so far.

I've had a Vertex 2 for over a year now and had no issues, bought a Kingston Hyper X a few months back and that too seems to be doing the job nicely :)

I've had one failure on a Revo x2 240GB. I did beat that into submission at least ~500GB a day for months, I was still willing to give it another chance since the speed is so addictive! Since that one last year I've had no problems. Like some of the others I've had many more problems in the same time period with HDDs.

I think most of the issues will be very situation specific and tbh, the survey could easily be skewed by disgruntled buyers willing to pass on their anger whereas people who've been happy may have skipped it, and who's to say the respondents even had SSDs? That's impossible to prove, this is the internet :)

I had 2 OCZ Vertex II's and BOTH of them blew up. The first within 6 months and the replacement just after a year. Awful drives and while they may be cheap I would advise anyone to avoid them if they value their data. Their SSD failure rate is far worse than traditional HDs even though SSDs are meant to be MORE reliable! 15% of OCZ drives fail says the French website that looked into SSD failure. That's an unbelievable amount - more than all the other manufacturers put together! How they stay in business I don't know.

I went and bought an Intel 320 SSD precisely because I wanted something reliable (and made sure the firmware was post the 8MB bug) and am very happy with it.

This won't put me off buying my first SSD :D