It's always interesting when people talk about SSD failure. One of the big selling points of SSDs are their presumptive reliability. Since there are no moving parts, SSDs' service life tend to only be judged by it's ability to write new data. Thus, SSDs tend to be considered far superior to HDDs.
I generally agree with this assessment. As an owner of two Samsung 830 256GB drives, I see the value. That said, I feel that SSD reliability has be grossly overestimated industry wide and should not be used as proponent for purchase.
Based on what I said earlier about service life being judged by an SSD's ability to write new data, most drives not exposed to excessive write schedules should be as viable today as they were when first installed, without any type of file level intervention with the exception of garbage collection.
While the vast majority of drives do maintain a minimal level of functionality many of them experience performance degradation and instability, often requiring a clear/reformat to restore performance in the best cases, to catastrophic data loss in the worst cases. In many of these situations, this is long before the drives are in danger of hitting it's limit of writing new data. Whether it's bad firmware, limitations of the hardware, etc, I think it's bad form to trumpet about reliability as a leading reason to own an SSD, second only to speed.
When hardware fails, it can generally be attributed to one of three things: design flaw, manufactoring defect/bad parts, or end of service life. These can happen to any product. The problem with SSDs, is that the vast majority of failures fall into the first two categories, while it's reliability is almost universally judged by the third category.
Now, I'm not saying that SDDs aren't worth the trouble. Everyone's experience will vary. Those that never had problems will say so and argue that reliability is absolutely better than HDDs. Those that have had big problems will argue that reliaibity is absolutely no better but in fact worse than HDDs in many cases.
I'm just asking people to stop saying that just because they don't have moving parts SSDs are intrinsically more reliable than HDDs because performance degradation and instability are also hits against reliability, even if the hardware itself remains functional. There are issues that SSDs have that were never problems with HDDs, yet these tend to be ignored as reasons for criticizing SSDs.
I generally agree with this assessment. As an owner of two Samsung 830 256GB drives, I see the value. That said, I feel that SSD reliability has be grossly overestimated industry wide and should not be used as proponent for purchase.
Based on what I said earlier about service life being judged by an SSD's ability to write new data, most drives not exposed to excessive write schedules should be as viable today as they were when first installed, without any type of file level intervention with the exception of garbage collection.
While the vast majority of drives do maintain a minimal level of functionality many of them experience performance degradation and instability, often requiring a clear/reformat to restore performance in the best cases, to catastrophic data loss in the worst cases. In many of these situations, this is long before the drives are in danger of hitting it's limit of writing new data. Whether it's bad firmware, limitations of the hardware, etc, I think it's bad form to trumpet about reliability as a leading reason to own an SSD, second only to speed.
When hardware fails, it can generally be attributed to one of three things: design flaw, manufactoring defect/bad parts, or end of service life. These can happen to any product. The problem with SSDs, is that the vast majority of failures fall into the first two categories, while it's reliability is almost universally judged by the third category.
Now, I'm not saying that SDDs aren't worth the trouble. Everyone's experience will vary. Those that never had problems will say so and argue that reliability is absolutely better than HDDs. Those that have had big problems will argue that reliaibity is absolutely no better but in fact worse than HDDs in many cases.
I'm just asking people to stop saying that just because they don't have moving parts SSDs are intrinsically more reliable than HDDs because performance degradation and instability are also hits against reliability, even if the hardware itself remains functional. There are issues that SSDs have that were never problems with HDDs, yet these tend to be ignored as reasons for criticizing SSDs.
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