SSD Failure rates

Based on all the recommendations about the benefits of SSDs, over the last 2 months, I replaced all my hard-drives in my personal lab with SSDs.

As I started to read more about wear-leveling techniques - I have been coming across stories about how SSD's failures are more common than most people expect.

Some reading...

Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive? : SSD Reliability: Is Your Data Really Safe?
Coding Horror: The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale

So now - I've become a little paranoid and I'm in the process of setting up a NAS to do backups of all my VMs (I run everything from VMs).

Question - have anyone experience bad SSD crashes - are they are traumatic as I have read - I.E - SSH just crashes and you are done... And how often do your SSD's crash?

Or am I simply buying into the FUD.

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Comments

ptilsen

These articles are outdated. Reliability and longevity have drastically improved over the last 18 months or so.

I remember choosing not to buy back in 2010 and into early 2011 because reliability was still around or below hard drives and price was too high. Those failure rates were very well reflected in Newegg ratings on all SSDs. Finally, later in 2011, the Crucial M4 started to stand out with some of the highest ratings. I picked up the 256GB version and used it in my desktop for about nine months. I think bought the Crucial M4 512GB, took an image of my desktop, restored it to the 512GB and installed the 256GB in my new laptop along with Windows 7. Both Crucials are going strong to this day, and I put them through a lot. Multiple concurrent VMs each day, occasional video encoding, lots of gaming, creating and extracting compressed archives. There are Samsung and Intel drives with even lower failure rates, but the M4s were the better price point for me.

I've also built four other systems with other brand drives (mostly Corsair, IIRC), and no failures yet.

You should have a backup regardless. No amount of hardware redundancy or reliability ever negates that need. SSDs come with warranties just like HDDs, so a good backup system and the warranties make them well worth the hassle.

Edit: This is not to negate the research done in the one TH article with a few anecdotes, but what I am getting at is that things have improved in the last year and a half. Drives are much better now.

N2IT

It really depends on the type of environment you are talking about.

Billy in the controlled lab, a rapture HDD might be more stable especially if you run any kind of RAID. If you are farmer bill or a salesman and toss your laptop into the car without the drive parked (standby or hibernate) then the SSD wins out all day every day.

N2IT

pt good post.

paul78

Thanks guys - I'll have to do some research on the more recent SSD drives. I do data backups only so my concern is more around losing multiple VM's and having to rebuild a lot of VM's.

N2 - I don't farm but I do garden in the spring and summer - do you think that would impact my SSD MTBF

N2IT

Smartass LOL.

Just for that I'll poor another Macellan 18.

paul78

I'm on my third martini for the evening so cheers...

SteveLord

I run multiple SSDs in my desktop at home, desktop at work and laptops at work. Mostly Crucial M4s, but I do have a few Samsung 830s. No major failures yet at all. I also have some Intel drives from their first generation of products.

There are some bad ones out there, but it is a lot less. There are tons of new brands to the game also. I would put Crucial, Samsung and Intel at the top. Based on my own experience and reading through tons of user feedback.

W Stewart

I personally haven't used an SSD but in the data center I work at, I hear they have a high failure rate.

tpatt100

If my SSD fails in my desktop I will just lose my games and operating system, all my personal stuff is on a regular drive.

GoodBishop

I bet in 5-7 years cloud storage will overtake hard drives...

Roguetadhg

Likewise, I just keep my desktop and installed games on my main drive. Everything else is a separate. Learned the hardway before.

WafflesAndRootbeer

I run an Intel 320 160GB in my desktop and my notebook is about to get a 512gb Crucial M4. I will never ever go back to HDDs. As for brands, Intel is now using SandForce controllers so I won't use their latest drives - older series are non-SandForce but too expensive to buy compared to Crucial and Samsung's current drives - and Crucial and Samsung are the only brands I would consider now. Everyone else is using SandForce controllers and they have a poor track record on controller quality with a long history of their SSD controllers "shutting down" not to mention their firmware updates are all over the place with the "code-sharing" agreements they have now. Some partners get updated firmware and others do not without several months window of exclusivity for preferred partners like Intel and Sandisk. Crucial uses Marvell controllers which are okay but not great though perfectly reliable and Samsung makes their own flash memory and drive controllers, which seem to work very well. There's a big Crucial/Samsung SSD sale going on right now so pop on over to Newegg and take a look at what's available.

forestgiant

SSDs can and do fail, and the security upside to when they fail is just how technically difficult to recover any data at all from them. That means the average Joe's and Jane's with backups has little reasonable fear his/her data will fall into the wrong hands.

Long live SSDs.

kriscamaro68

I have done quite a bit of ssd testing and buying over the past 2 years. I have owned OCZ, Mushkin, Intel, Samsung personally. I have also tested and used Transcend, Crucial, and Sandisk. I have put all of them through their paces and have found that Samsung is the best all around ssd. With all other ssd's except for Crucial/Samsung they all use the sandforce controller. As of right now the Sandforce controller is quite fast at certain things but, they suck balls if you bitlocker them. The sandforce controller handles the data stream different then the other 2 and does not like encrypting/decrypting drives.

In my testing the sandforce controllers all had the same result regradless of brand. Before bitlockering they all would average about 550mb read and 530mb write. Once bitlockered though they would drop to about 500mb read and 130mb write. However the Samsung took no real performance hit with encryption on as it handles the data stream better. The Crucial M4's took a 10mb hit on both read and writes but nowhere near the sandforce.

Also the actual sustained IOPS on the Samsung and Crucial are higher in real life testing. The others will claim high IOPS in the 90k range but in testing they are not able to sustain what the other 2 can do.

My testing was done with atto disk benchmark on all drives using the same version on all of them.

My advice buy the Samsung Pro series drives. Samsung came out with their 840 series but not all the drives are pro drives. The lower end drives use TLC flash rather than MLC and the TLC does not have as long of a life as the MLC but is still a decent drive for the $$$. OCZ is starting to stray away from sandforce controllers now and is getting better as well. Till the other manufactures get away from sandforce I have no intention of ever buying from any of them again.

Thats my .02 HTH.

MentholMoose

I've been satisfied with most of the SSDs I've owned in the last three years. The one exception is a SuperTalent IDE drive I bought in the hope that it would extend the life of an old laptop (Thinkpad T42p, bought in 2005). Besides an improved Windows boot time, it was much slower than a regular hard drive. So far I've had one SSD failure, with a 240 GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe. It died within a week or two, and the replacement from Amazon has been working fine for months.

My current laptop has two early Sandforce drives (160GB OCZ, 120GB Corsair) and they are still working fine for my needs (heavy use of VMs, but no Bitlocker). My desktop (mainly used for games and photo editing) has a 256 GB Crucial M4 and it is great as well. In other machines (HTPC, family members' PCs, lab machines) I have SSDs from various vendors (Samsung, Sandisk, Plextor, Kingston) and I've been satisfied with them all.

I think the key is to check the reviews of a particular drive before buying it. There have been a few drive models that have had really bad reliability (e.g. the OCZ "extended" Sandforce drives), so avoid those. Also search reviews for known issues. For example, the Bitlocker problem mentioned by kriscamaro68 might be a deal breaker if you use Bitlocker, but I've never heard of it since I don't use Bitlocker.

I do have some of the newer Sandforce drives that had broken TRIM, and even without TRIM, they worked fine. This was resolved by a firmware update. On my laptop (running Linux) I forgot to enable TRIM and didn't notice a problem. I think most recent SSDs are just so fast that even a big performance drop will be imperceptible for most uses.

paul78

Thanks for everyone's thoughts on the subject... I tend to lean toward doomday prepping so I definitely be looking to supplement the half-dozen SSD's (Corsair Force 3) that I just got with some traditional online disk storage for backups.

The one thing that I will say is that the SSD's have come a long way. I recently found a couple of SimpleTech 32MB (yes that's MB) drives that I had bought probably 10 or more years ago. I'm gonna see if they still work.

SteveLord

There is a new "favored brand" every year with SSDs. At first, it was Intel, then OCZ, then Crucial and now Samsung is the favorite. OCZ's failure in the relability department started making people value it more than raw speed, which OCZ was on top for originally.

lsud00d

My 64gb Crucial M4 has done me good since 8/2010 and I just picked up a 256gb M4 because they are on uber sale and nearly at my $0.50/gb price point...I REALLY want to get 2 but am holding back...

Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 Solid State Drive - Newegg.com

Asif Dasl

FWIW The OCZ Vector drives are amongst the fastest out there at the moment, don't know about failure rates with them or encryption performance though. This is just a general benchmark but the second link show it outperforms the Samsung 840 Pro. Pricey though!

PassMark Software - Hard Drive Benchmark Charts

Real-World Read And Write Tests : OCZ Vector 256 GB Review: An SSD Powered By Barefoot 3

SteveLord

So what?

OCZ's reputation has tanked because they sought speed over reliability. Consumers that aren't strictly just benchmark nerds have caught on. That's the point I am getting at. The difference in speed between today's and even yesterday's SSDs is barely noticeable to the naked eye. You can tout read/write speeds and benchmarks all you want......until your computer freezes regularly or the drive just dies on the spot.

Asif Dasl

Just out of interest where can I see OCZ's reputation has tanked? NewEgg? I have a few OCZ SSD's & RAM and haven't had a problem with them so far.

tpatt100

I bought my SSDs off Newegg and there was an OCZ drive that got a ton of bad reviews due to failures. Anecdotal of course but I went to the OCZ forums and this drive was known for having issues so it might have been a bad model I guess. "OR" it might be they had a lot of sales and increased the possibility of a larger group having the same model of drive so failures occurred more frequently for the brand, who knows.

Is A Recall Brewing at OCZ? - TechInsidr | TechInsidr

sratakhin

I used an OCZ Vertex 64 GB drive for almost two years before replacing it with Crucial m4 256 GB. Haven't had any problems. Had two hard drives that developed problems during this time, however. One died completely (a mechanical failure, couldn't spin up), and the other one got bad sectors.

ptilsen

Nearly every OCZ drive on Newegg for the past two years has had relatively bad reviews specifically mentioning drive failure. I don't consider this anecdotal. The number of reviews for a popular item at Newegg represent statistical significance.

The thing to look at is not number of eggs, but the breakdown of the rating. OCZ drives almost all have over 15% 1-egg ratings. One-egg rating pretty much always indicate failure. By comparison, a product which scores the same average due to lots of 4s ("not perfect," or "not as good as I thought) but fewer 1s might be slower, but it sure is going to be a lot more reliable. Extending that, Newegg seems to have altered ordering to actually place more-popular items with lower ratings above less-popular items with better ratings. Case in point, Vertex 3 120GB gets 24% one-egg reviews -- showing a really high failure rate -- while M4 128GB gets 9% 1-egg. Vertex 3 still shows up above M4 in a "best rating" sort, illustrating how important it is to dig into reviews.

This all applies more or less identically to Amazon. Professional reviews are still worth a read to get some details, but the aggregate reviewer opinion can tell you a lot that a review or benchmark won't.

Asif Dasl

Thanks for that ptilsen, I'll check NewEgg for reviews in future. The sites I order from are not great for the amount of reviews compared to NewEgg.

SteveLord

I have two OCZ Vertex 3 120s and never changed the firmware on him. Why? Because I felt lucky considering all the reports of failures at the time. And that didn't stop with new firmware either. Since they still work, I don't touch them. They're also not as easy to update as Crucial. There was some kind of requirement that prevented me from doing so, but I forget what it was.

OCZ seems to be doing a little better with their Vertex 4 series, but in mean time...the market has exploded with many brands to choose from.

I use Newegg and Amazon for reviews because they are some of the biggest websites for electronics. Amazon, I use for almost everything. Granted, some of the reviews are idiotic, but that is why I skim through them and don't rely completely on the rating percentages. Sometimes a review will reveal a complete deal breaker.

tpatt100

I use reviews to look for a trend in issues, if I see several failures and the reviews are in a three month window of time then I can see there might be an issue with a particular batch or model.

Some reviews are just stupid but you can see when people down rank those reviews as not useful.

GAngel

We use them as cache drives in our arrays because they fail at a significantly faster rate than regular disks. 3rd gens have gotten better but still above a level i'd use for storage. Usage is probably 1000x higher than in a home environment they are being accessed 23hrs a day 360 days a year.

At home I only use them for caching and have only had one fail from intels first defective batch.

j23evan

When I went to SSD's I read the Mean Time to Failure was around 2 million hours. I purchased some OCZ's and within 30 days had a computer crash that corrupted the drive and made the data unrecoverable. I could have wiped and reused it, but I had already lost faith in the brand. I ended up replacing it with an Intel SSD with a newer gen controller for quite a bit more, and have not had a single issue with it in the 6 months ive had it. As in most cases, you get what you pay for.