Are SSD's actually reliable?

By Raphhashem
February 17, 2014 in Storage Devices

Go to solution Solved by brob, February 21, 2014

I'm unsure whether I should buy an ssd as I always hear about limited reads and writes they can perform before they die. I've never heard this about standard hard drives and somehow I've never had a hard drive die on me. I'm still using a 20gb maxtor hard drive as a boot from, I can't even remember when. I have a 1tb Wd blue hard drive for games and pretty much everything though. If I buy an SSD and use it as a boot drive, will it last me? And would it be worth it on sata two?

"I'm planning on buying a Samsung 840 EVO 120gb ssd and want to use it as a boot drive. Will it last as long as my normal hard drive and be worth using on sata II?"

http://techreport.com/review/25889/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-500tb-update

No I haven't used an SSD and I gave valid reasons throughout my posts as to why I and some others have not jumped on board with these. There just really is no point in me getting one at this time and for many reasons I can't recommend others getting them in certain situations ... many situations honestly.

Don't you find it curious that those who give ssd a serious try end up becoming committed proponents?

slightly off topic, so I'm considering going with two SSDs in RAID 0 and ditching HDD completely. I believe linus mentioned that RAID 0 has a higher chance of failure, but in real life how likely is it to fail?

All RAID arrays are not only open to unit failure, they can also be broken because of logical issues. (Things like a BIOS being flashed and the SATA mode not being reset to RAID before the system tries to boot.) The problem with RAID 0 is that unlike other levels is offers no protection from unit failure and suffers complete loss of data should the array break.

Besides, except in situation where large serial writes and reads occur ssd in RAID 0 can perform worse than a single large drive, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html.

Posted February 21, 2014

It will last longer than you will want to keep it. You will be looking for an upgrade more than likely before it dies. If you worry about the drive dying, you should invest a few extra dollars into a 840 Pro that uses MLC NAND which will withstand a larger amount of write cycles. Otherwise the 840 EVO is still a very dependable drive.