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I disagree about the long-term reliability of SSDs. Intel's X25-M has a 5 year warranty. They claim that writing 100GB/day for 5 years will not cause it to fail

I disagree about the long-term reliability of SSDs. Intel's X25-M has a 5 year warranty. They claim that writing 100GB/day for 5 years will not cause it to fail. If we compare the technologies in terms of reliability, flash has three things going for it: 1. Flash degrades predictably over time. Manufacturers know the average number of write cycles a cell can sustain and design SSDs with "spare" flash and wear leveling. They can engineer the expected lifetime of the drive. Hard drives usually fail spontaneously. 2. The most common failure mode for flash cells is to fail on write. Even if a cell gets "stuck," the data can still be read. Hard drives fail on read or write, and in most cases all data on the drive is lost. 3. A 3.5" 7200RPM drive's platters spin at 70mph on the outside edge. The head gap is measured in millionths of an inch, making them very susceptible to vibration and shock. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they're practically immune. There are really only two disadvantages of SSDs: cost and capacity.

sokoloff 17y ago
Most hard drive faults do not cause an instant loss of all data on the drive. (Look at SMART reallocated sectors/events. Take 50 of your drives that are "working just fine" and I'll bet that 10 of them have reallocated sectors.)
- AngryParsley 17y ago
  From http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf "Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count." Most drives that fail have no SMART errors. In other words they fail spontaneously. BTW, if you have a drive with even a single error, replace it now or at least make sure you have a spare on hand: "After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors." "After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts, making the critical threshold for this parameter also one."

sokoloff 17y ago

Most hard drive faults do not cause an instant loss of all data on the drive. (Look at SMART reallocated sectors/events. Take 50 of your drives that are "working just fine" and I'll bet that 10 of them have reallocated sectors.)

AngryParsley 17y ago
From http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf "Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count." Most drives that fail have no SMART errors. In other words they fail spontaneously. BTW, if you have a drive with even a single error, replace it now or at least make sure you have a spare on hand: "After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors." "After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts, making the critical threshold for this parameter also one."