A few years ago SS Drives were prone to failure.
I'm sure reliability has been improved, but are they as reliable as the old hard drives are?
Anyone know the mean time between failure, or similar data? I've tried googling for this, no luck.
Posted Oct 17, 2011, 8:45 PM UTC
Here is a long article on the subject. Bottom line (from the summary at the end) is it is probably too soon to tell, but they are not likely any less reliable.
Only about a billion times more, yeah.
Though that's hyperbole, it's also common sense. What's more reliable: A bunch of spinning discs that a speck of dust can throw off or a square of immobile memory?
They are reliable but NOT invincible. Buy them for speed but still back up.
oh yeah, always backup. I'm concerned because this outer is running a security system 24/7 and I need reliability. I also use it for work and play, so it's nice to have an SSD.
Looks like they are reliable. I'm getting a 27" i7 SSD iMac soon.
In my experience, no, I had an early SSD, did a clean install and about a day later shit just completely disappeared, no partition map, nothing. Just gone.
Much more than a spinning drive. But, they are not infallible. I see many computers and have only seen one SSD drive fail.
They're as reliable as classic spinning drives and sometimes rate better. Apple and others wouldn't use them in notebooks and smartphones en masse if they'd fail easily.
On classic drives the mechanics wear out, on SSDs the memory cells wear out (delete cycles are limited). Controllers of SSDs can do wear leveling and can also mark bad blocks just like classic drives do it. Larger drives have a longer lifetime because of this.
Major laptop manufacturers, like Apple, wouldn't put them in their laptops if they felt the failure rate would be significantly higher than traditional drives. As much as a manufacturer would like to have a good support rating, they'd really rather the last time they interacted with their customer was the point of sale, at least until they return to purchase another product. Reliability is much more important than support rating, and less expensive.
You say that like it's a bad thing. SSDs are better than spinning drives in pretty much every regard. That's the simple reason they're used. Sure every manufacturer including Apple would like to see the customer at the point of sale for the last time. But they still understand that above average customer support is part of their success.
I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I'd rather the last time I saw them was the point of sale too. I appreciate products that work properly all the time, and when I need a new product I will support companies that have sold me reliable merchandise in the past.