73 % of SSD owners won't experience malfunction of SSDs – study

[sgloux3470]

Bought a new SSD late last year and it failed on me already. Only piece of hardware that I've ever had fail on ne that wasn't a Seagate drive.

Doesn't mean much of course. But I hate dealing with warranty.

[Fetzie]

Crucial has some of the best value in the industry. 

 

Not quite the best at everything, but the pricing is how SSDs should be priced if these guys really give a damn about driving adoption and driving costs down. 

 

That, and Crucial give you those free firmware updates that increase the speed of the SSD by 20-30%

 

They also manufacture their own flash chips (either Crucial owns Micron or Micron owns Crucial, I don't know which way around) which means they can keep costs down because they don't have to pay royalties to Intel or Samsung for chips.

[Yog]

The only thing I find funnier than this article are people staunchly defending SSDs when they don't need to. Everything fails, it's inevitable, your magic SSD doesn't last forever...you might as well replace SSD in this article with cats. 27% of owners have seen cat failure. And then you see people defending cats "THIS STUDY MUST BE FAULS BECAUSE I'VE SEEN 200 CATS AND THEY WERE ALL LIVING!" "DOGZ FAILZ MUCH MORE THAN CATZ!" "IF CAT FAIL SO MUCH CAT PRODUCER WOULD GO OUT OF BUSINESS!"

 

I don't mean to insult anyone using those arguments, though, I suppose the way I dramatized your reasoning would make it seem so, I really just wanted to express my point that the study is ridiculous because EVERYTHING FAILS. SSDs fail, they fail more than HHDs, especially the early SSDs and this study isn't studying just new ones, they're studying all SSDs...if you've been purchasing SSDs for a while, unless you throw them away before their time is up, you've had at least one fail. Which is why this study is pretty lame...and I hope my cat examples showed that...everything fails. Companies manufacturing SSDs aren't going out of business because...well, first because there aren't any that I know of that just sell SSDs and second people know SSDs fail (well, probably not all but a lot of people) but they buy them anyway because their speed outweighs their relatively short lifespan.

[patrickjp93]

It doesn't even really matter if it's spread out, since any part of the SSD can be accessed equally fast. The problem with HDDs is you first have to physically move the read/write head, and then you have to wait for the disk to spin until the data reaches the head. Both of those things are glacially slow compared to just pushing electrons down one path or another.

Incorrect. The data is spread out for PARALLEL access. Just as you can only make 1 CPU core go so fast, you can only make NAND flash chips switch so quickly, so accessing more at once allows for greater throughput at the same latency. This is why most cheap USBs can barely outpace a good multi-platter HDD.

 

In fact this is why everyone wants to move SSDs over to the NVMe protocol and put compatibility for it into motherboard chipsets. SSDs can easily go 8x faster than they currently do. The bottleneck is currently simulating the AHCI protocol which was designed for spinning rust with no conception of SSDs at the time.

[Akolyte]

It doesn't say which brands failed compared to others.  All those guys could have used OCZ or some cheap brand.  Samsung, Crucial and Intel SSDs I would imagine would have a very low malfunction rate. 

[Speedbird]

Can you even defrag an SSD on Windows?

On XP you can

[Speedbird]

That, and Crucial give you those free firmware updates that increase the speed of the SSD by 20-30%

I want one for my MX100

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

The only thing I find funnier than this article are people staunchly defending SSDs when they don't need to. Everything fails, it's inevitable, your magic SSD doesn't last forever...you might as well replace SSD in this article with cats. 27% of owners have seen cat failure. And then you see people defending cats "THIS STUDY MUST BE FAULS BECAUSE I'VE SEEN 200 CATS AND THEY WERE ALL LIVING!" "DOGZ FAILZ MUCH MORE THAN CATZ!" "IF CAT FAIL SO MUCH CAT PRODUCER WOULD GO OUT OF BUSINESS!"

 

I don't mean to insult anyone using those arguments, though, I suppose the way I dramatized your reasoning would make it seem so, I really just wanted to express my point that the study is ridiculous because EVERYTHING FAILS. SSDs fail, they fail more than HHDs, especially the early SSDs and this study isn't studying just new ones, they're studying all SSDs...if you've been purchasing SSDs for a while, unless you throw them away before their time is up, you've had at least one fail. Which is why this study is pretty lame...and I hope my cat examples showed that...everything fails. Companies manufacturing SSDs aren't going out of business because...well, first because there aren't any that I know of that just sell SSDs and second people know SSDs fail (well, probably not all but a lot of people) but they buy them anyway because their speed outweighs their relatively short lifespan.

Cats don't fail.  They rule.

 

[Sakkura]

OCZ agility 3 and Kingston V300 owner here. Neither has broken, the OCZ is about 3 years old, the kingston one is about 5 months.

 

I hope you got the old V300 with Toshiba toggle mode NAND, because the newer V300 with async NAND is pretty damn similar to that old, slow OCZ Agility 3. Except that performance was meh in 2011-12 but really damn sad in late 2014.

 

Incorrect. The data is spread out for PARALLEL access. Just as you can only make 1 CPU core go so fast, you can only make NAND flash chips switch so quickly, so accessing more at once allows for greater throughput at the same latency. This is why most cheap USBs can barely outpace a good multi-platter HDD.

 

In fact this is why everyone wants to move SSDs over to the NVMe protocol and put compatibility for it into motherboard chipsets. SSDs can easily go 8x faster than they currently do. The bottleneck is currently simulating the AHCI protocol which was designed for spinning rust with no conception of SSDs at the time.

 

It doesn't matter how spread out it is. Whether it's on the chip next to it or way over on the other end, it makes no difference.

 

And yeah you don't get much parallelism with AHCI anyway.

[Robi_g]

I hope you got the old V300 with Toshiba toggle mode NAND, because the newer V300 with async NAND is pretty damn similar to that old, slow OCZ Agility 3. Except that performance was meh in 2011-12 but really damn sad in late 2014.

But it's cheap, I boot in ~15 seconds, and don't have to worry so much about dropping my laptop.

[Sakkura]

That, and Crucial give you those free firmware updates that increase the speed of the SSD by 20-30%

 

They also manufacture their own flash chips (either Crucial owns Micron or Micron owns Crucial, I don't know which way around) which means they can keep costs down because they don't have to pay royalties to Intel or Samsung for chips.

 

Crucial isn't even a separate company, it's just Consumer Micron Thing™ because reasons.

[patrickjp93]

I hope you got the old V300 with Toshiba toggle mode NAND, because the newer V300 with async NAND is pretty damn similar to that old, slow OCZ Agility 3. Except that performance was meh in 2011-12 but really damn sad in late 2014.

 

 

It doesn't matter how spread out it is. Whether it's on the chip next to it or way over on the other end, it makes no difference.

 

And yeah you don't get much parallelism with AHCI anyway.

No parallelism in AHCI? Do you know how multi-platter HDDs work? They store/access your data in parallel too. Their limitation is still of course arm movement speed and spindle speed.

[PerfectTemplar]

I have used SSDs for years now, about 5 years I think. I have gone through about 3 out of 7 of the ones I've owned. Obviously failure rate earlier on was higher however I think I may have got unlucky.

[Plasma]

i had my intel 330 die recently but i had it for two years and that seems to be the norm for the early gen ssd. i am now on a 840 evo

[Inkz]

Stop buying OCZ SSDs then!

 

My A-DATA SP900 aswell as my new Samsung 850 EVO haven't failed on me yet.

My Vertex 3 so far so good.

[NAP51DMustang]

i had my intel 330 die recently but i had it for two years and that seems to be the norm for the early gen ssd. i am now on a 840 evo

Not to make you feel bad but my 320 series Intel is still kicking along just as good as when I bought it about 4 years ago now

[Fetzie]

Not to make you feel bad but my 320 series Intel is still kicking along just as good as when I bought it about 4 years ago now

 

As is my M4

[Opcode]

Kingston V300 60GB (Toshiba NAND) reporting in after 2 years and not a single problem.

[Bicketybam]

I've currently got 4 SSD's.  3 x Samsung and 1 x OCZ Vertex 2 (which was my first SSD).  The OCZ did fail about 1 month before its "3 year" warranty was up but they happily exchanged it.  By that stage it had progressed through 2 different machines.  The replacement is used in a special external hdd case that supports SSD's as a temporary hard drive.  Slow but it works fine.

 

Technology fails from time to time, not for everyone but it does happen.  Depending on how old that technology is and how big the sample size is will determine how big the % of failure vs success will be.  In 25 years I've had lots of HDD's fail but then not nearly enough for me to think all hdd's will have issues. In fact most are fine and last for years.

[Sakkura]

No parallelism in AHCI? Do you know how multi-platter HDDs work? They store/access your data in parallel too. Their limitation is still of course arm movement speed and spindle speed.

 

I said not much parallelism, I did not say no parallelism.

[Takata]

No parallelism in AHCI? Do you know how multi-platter HDDs work? They store/access your data in parallel too. Their limitation is still of course arm movement speed and spindle speed.

According to the guy answering questions on the WD thread a while back, HDDs don't do work in parallel like -that-. You can't have one head following one track on one platter and simultaneously have another head following another track on another platter, because the multiple tracks and heads are not all aligned with each other.

 

About the "study": there doesn't seem to be any normalisation for number of SSDs and HDDs owned. If you have owned more HDDs (and I suspect most people have), then that makes you more likely to have suffered an HDD failure.

[Snadzies]

The altered title didn't really influence my outlook.

My first thought was still "This is still a really large amount of people who have problems with SSDs."

Not really something that set off any red flags for me, though, as it isn't like HDDs never fail.

Regardless of the data being on an SSD or HDD I'm still going to have copies of any important data I don't want to lose so such figures really don't change my habits or feelings towards SSDs and HDDs any.

 

I do have varying levels of confidence in the longevity of the various SSDs I have.

Highest is my Intel 530. It seemed like Intel put a little more work towards reliability over performance.

Second is the Kingston V300 I put in my sister's PC. Seems like a middle of the road SSD overall.

Lowest is the OCZ (Agility III I think) that was replaced by the Intel 530. I bought it a couple years ago just to see how first hand how these SSDs performed vs HDDs and since then OCZ SSDs seem to have a hit or miss reputation for reliability.

The OCZ I threw into a cousin's PC as it was in need of a fresh windows instal and figured "Why not?".

[ThatOtherGuy95]

my corsair force 120GB sad died the other day

 

only had it 3 years  

 

so sad

[shermantanker]

I have an 840 pro and an 840 evo. Both run like champs.

[vXhanz]

My macbook only uses an SSD... that being said though, I do back up my information to the "cloud" as well as to an external HDD. I agree that everything will fail at some point.