SSD less reliable than HDD?

sab0tage · 6 Sep 2011 at 10:09

I've had a Corsair Performance 3 64GB SSD for 7 months and around 3 months ago I had to do a secure erase on it to get it working after it would repeatedly cause the system to lock up, and it would fail to complete a chkdisk. It is now doing the same again! I've had HDDs with bad sectors before, but they have never made any system I've had completely lockup they just mark the sectors as bad and ignore them but the SSD seems to be completely incapable of this.

Am I just unlucky that I've got a crap SSD or are they generally orders of magnitude less reliable than mechanical disks?

CaptainUnlikely · 6 Sep 2011 at 11:53

SSDs with Sandforce controllers, like yours, are pretty unreliable, sorry to say.
Almost all the other modern controllers are really reliable, so I'd say apart from Sandforce SSDs they are more reliable than hard drives.
You do tend to find that if an SSD goes bad it will have more of an effect on the system though, causing lockups and blue screens.

Zaim · 6 Sep 2011 at 12:01

My OCZ Vertex Turbo died the other day, just over a month old.

WarpedMind · 6 Sep 2011 at 12:07

OCZ may be onto a solution, fingers crossed.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...-simpler-fix!!&p=676176&viewfull=1#post676176

ecat · 6 Sep 2011 at 13:57

This study of failure rates based on information from various data centres makes for an interesting read, I'll link the last page...

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,review-32241-9.html

tl;dr:

Giving credit where it is due, many of the IT managers we interviewed reiterated that Intel's SLC-based SSDs are the shining standard by which others are measured. But according to Dr. Hughes, there's nothing to suggest that its products are significantly more reliable than the best hard drive solutions. We don’t have failure rates beyond two years of use for SSDs, so it’s possible that this story will change.

Still tl;dr: ymmv, backup often!