Due to the blatant scaremongering on this issue by certain members of the community, I thought I’d try and work out how to post polls. With science.
If you have seen one (or more) fail, tell us how they went and what you’d been doing with them.
My SSD is fine so far after 3 months.
I haven’t even dignified the other topic with a response.
If we were to take my experience with Seagate hard drives over the past 18 months as an indicator, then I have six drives that prove that 100% of all 1.5/2TB spinning platter drives will fail within 9 months. (3 drives, and all three of their replacements.) And I have friends who’ve had spinning platter drives die within the last year as well, backing up my thesis that they will all die, and die quickly. So, anecdata, as McCullough called it once when negating my life experience, is useless.
Of course, looking at a wider sample, only 16% of my non-Seagate drives have failed. And none of the four SSDs (two in use, two retired after over a year of usage) have died.
I had a kingston ssd die at work under 3 months but it might have been the system it was in.
Given it seems to be the controller, I wonder if heat is an issue. Are the main failures in laptop systems or desktops?
1 week, super-ventilated (no, seriously, it’s like a Goddamned jet engine) desktop, OCZ Vertex 2 (Sandforce controller). That one may have actually been a data cell or bus issue, rather than controller, as it didn’t consistently disappear from BIOS, but it did consistently fail to allow reading or writing to the point of borking a Windows install, a backup, and a restore.
Weren’t vanishing drives also supposed to be the result of the early P67 flaw with the 6GB/s port on Intel’s new SB motherboards?
Good lord. That may be the geekiest thing I’ve ever written.
They said it would be a gradual effect, but maybe they lied.
If so, you’re pretty clear on the geek front.
Alistair: yes, but many people reporting issues with drives disappearing are on older mobos; true 6GB/s drives and mobos are relatively new, while BIOS-invisible SSDs date back a long, long way.
I haven’t seen any dead SSDs yet. Only a matter of time though. I’ve deployed close to a dozen, though, and the recent scare has made me prioritize shoehorning those clients into backup systems kicking and screaming if necessary.
I think you need a separate thread on HDDs.
Have mine a year and had no problems.
Does this include those little USB drives? If so, mine’s lasted 6+ yrs, don’t use it much though. It’s so old, its capacity is only 36mb. I have it formatted to PHAT 32 or whatever so I can use it for my PS3.
Oh, it’s a Dell that came with my Dad’s computer.
Those aren’t SSDs.
Every part of that post hurt my brain.
No one’s ever referred to USB thumb/flash drives as SSDs no matter what their underlying tech is. It’s obvious the term refers to hard drive form factor.
Very touchy. We’ll walk on the eggshells then.
Ok, I’m here to learn. How is it obvious?
I have a ~8 month old ssd that started not being detected by the bios at boot. Then it started “disappearing” while the system was running. I had about 4gb free out of 32, and it turns out I may not have been leaving enough free space. Annoying. But i completely wiped the drive and reinstalled leaving 8gb free and it’s been working fine since then.
:P
I’ve also had non-SSDs fail like clockwork. No fucking idea what the deal is. I didn’t lose a single hard drive until 2000 or so, at which point they died about every 9 months.