IS this a reliable SSD?

You have to write terabytes per day for years to make longevity become an issue AFAIK. Unless the drive craps out for unnatural reasons.

I've been watching the longevity info on the SSDs that I have doing desktop duty and they are still at 100%. I've had a few of them for over a year now. I don't bother with any of the various crazy homeopathic Windows or cache tweaks either. Just using them as OS + apps drives as if they were small HDDs. I am quite curious as to how long they'll last and it's looking like a very long time at this rate.
 
Indeed, Swaaye is correct. My 120GB Vertex 2E drive (the E stands for "extended", which is another term for "less overprovisioned recovery blocks" so you get more storage for a cheaper price) has received over 1.5TB of writes in my time of ownership, and it too reports 100% of it's rated lifespan remaining. There have been no remappings or lost block corrections performed in its life.

The six 240GB Agility 3 drives I have in RAID0 are individually reporting around 1TB of writes each, and one of them has two 4k blocks that were remapped from the overprovisioned blocks. I wager, given the statistics on ALL of my SSD drives, that the single unit with two remapped blocks may have just been weak cells from manufacturing.

If the more modern 240GB drives maintain even half of the projected lifespan of my 120Gb drive, I would have to write several petabytes to my array before I did enough damage to actually start encountering data integrity issues.
 
Awesomeness! I take back my comment then and thank you both for that info, looks like I gotta get me some SSD luvin soon. :)
 
In all honesty if your buying a 128 gig or a 256 gig your prob going to replace it with something much faster and bigger before you run into bad nand
 
There are firmware issues however.

At least, I encountered such. Data corruption once every two or so restarts on a Vertex for instance. Almost since day 1. That's not nice.
 
entity279 said:
There are firmware issues however.

At least, I encountered such. Data corruption once every two or so restarts on a Vertex for instance. Almost since day 1. That's not nice.
Click to expand...

There can be issues, yes. Owning seven OCZ drives myself, I can say that not everyone encounters such problems, but they do exist.
 
Yup.

I would (weakly , since no support data was available for me) generalize it: SSD's will exhibit significantly more predictable hardware failures wrt to traditional hard drive. As for software issues concerning these devices, it is the other way round.


Funny thing is that something as well known and plain as an SATA driver + HDD can fail in utterly big ways. I've recently installed windows 7 on an AM3 system (on an old, proven hard drive). The disks would simply halt for 1-2 minutes (not doing anything at all except blinking the stupid activity LED) every 3-5 minutes. All this because the AMD SATA driver *had to be* set to maximum performance mode and not the alleged power saving mode it defaulted to. And I've even switched some drivers but all behaved in this way. :mad:
 
I dunno about HDD vs SSD reliability. HDDs certainly fail often enough or get damaged in notebooks and external enclosures for example.

On SATA drivers- I don't even use Intel's SATA driver anymore. I've been finding the MS stock AHCI driver to be preferable. For example, Intel's RS AHCI driver causes me a return from sleep delay that the MS driver does not. AMD's SATA drivers have been the topic of terror in innumerable forum threads and I though that Win7's AHCI driver was preferred for them.
 
Grall said:
Neither music, pictures or HD video are performance sensitive, so them living on a regular HDD - even an external USB drive - is completely acceptable.
Click to expand...

Of course and that's my point eg I'd need to pay another $80 for a HDD in addition to the cost of the SSD. With the hybrid I pay less for similar performance while also getting more capacity.
 
I have a Crucial M4 in my HTPC and a few weeks ago I suddenly started getting BSOD's with a resulting hard drive failure message on windows bootup upon restart. Turning off the system and on again would get back into windows but BSOD again after an hour or so. A quick google on SSD and BSOD turned up a firmware upgrade for my M4 which resolved an issue causing BSOD after 5000+ hours of use. Updated the firmware, no data loss and has been 100% stable since then.
 
I've noticed that Seagate skipped the 7200.13 series, never thought the suspicion about the number 13 would ever be meaningful but that's very understandable in this industry :LOL:
 
SSD life expectancy depends on the technology of the chips, the controller and the usage pattern.
Windows loves temps files, which isn't helping, I got several TB written on mine in about 30 months, it's fine, but it's an Intel SLC one.

I'd advise going for a reliable brand, Intel seems to be the best atm.
 
Mize said:
Meh. Used to be five years for barracudas.
Click to expand...

Yup, I have one at home running perfectly fine and with remaining warranty till Nov 2013. :D

I do wonder if something in their manufacturing processes was changed in a negative direction so now you have much less reliability. At least the difference from 5-year to 2-year warranty shows it.
 
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