5 ms·

Something to consider before going the SSD route: failure rates are high right now. The Intel X-25 series seem to be doing OK, but the Vertex2 and Vertex3 (bra

by rkalla 15y ago

Something to consider before going the SSD route: failure rates are high right now. The Intel X-25 series seem to be doing OK, but the Vertex2 and Vertex3 (brand new SandForce 2k-based drives) have really terrible failure rates. I've heard mixed things about the Crucial drives. I am sure you guys have read Jeff Atwood's post[1] about how every SSD they've put into machines in the last year has failed. I shared that around with a group of friends scattered around Chicago and the bay area - the friend in Chicago has a company with 30 employees. They have put SSDs in 12 of the developer machines, by the end of the year 10 had failed (Vertex2 drives). I think SSDs have a lot to offer, the performance is there for the right use-cases (which is almost every disk I/O scenario save for a few), but for a lot of folks the idea of having drives fail regularly is a suicide-inducing though (current company included). I'm sitting on my hands for an SSD not because I don't think they are awesome, too expensive or not big enough... I'm waiting because the failure rate seems to be painfully high in these things. I want some more time in the oven before I start sticking them in my work machines. There also seem to be other non-failure related issues as seen with the Vertex3 launch that everyone jumped on; Lookup "Windows BSOD Vertex3"[2] for a long list of issues. At least enough to make you take pause in buying one. I have a 11 year old Fujitsu drive that is still running, an 8 year old Seagate 15k SCSI drive that is still chugging and the two SATA's in my desktop now are both 3 years old (no RAID)... I expect 5 years out of a drive at this point, turning the speed up to 11 at the expense of digging back into my workstations or servers to replace busted drives and rebuild RAID arrays... uggggg... at least for me that sounds super painful. The only SSDs I would consider at this point if for some reason I had to get one are the Intel series, namely the 500 series. The X-25's (as mentioned) are still going strong with low failure rates and there is nothing to suggest the newer releases are any different. I'd rather see some 5-year results from those things before pulling the trigger though, which is why I haven't yet. I also haven't needed the insane speed. [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid... [2] http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=windows+bsod+vertex3&qscrl=1 http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...

christoph 15y ago
I'll take reliability over almost anything. I work out on the road 200+ days of 365. A drive failing on me while out in the wilds would be a ~~~~ing catastrophe. I can picture it now, Sunday night, after a long flight, code modified on the flight, not in a remote GIT update in a couple of days... failure in such a scenario would mean i'm out of job. No thanks, I'll take the slow HDD
- palish 15y ago
  At my last job, they got me an SSD. About a month later, I started coding a new feature for their product. It was a few hours' worth of work, and they were using CVS, and didn't really have a good branching model, so I didn't do any work-in-progress checkins. While I was coding the feature, the SSD failed. This manifested itself via all sorts of strange compiler errors, and so I rebooted. After that, Windows didn't show the SSD anymore, and my code was never seen again. So, while the SSD did save me some time, I effectively lost it all when it failed, due in part to my stupidity, but also due to the fact that you need to understand that if you buy an SSD, you MUST plan for failure. This is not an option, this is "yes-I-will-wear-a-helmet-while-riding-a-motorcycle-at-70-mph". Contrast that with my Dell laptop. I bought it in ~2007, and I've never had a problem with it (except I've had to replace the dim screen a couple times).
  - danudey 15y ago
    If you buy storage media, you must plan for failure. Having worked in data centres, I've seen spinning disk drives DOA, die after a week, die in clusters (sequential serials, different machines), etc. SSDs aren't 100% reliable, but neither are HDs. You lost your SSD at an inopportune time, and that sucks, but it could just as easily have been a spinning disk that died, or it could have died after you finished a nightly system backup so you had no data loss at all. It's pure coincidence.
- dlsspy 15y ago
  > I'll take reliability over almost anything. Then measure reliability by IO operation instead of wall clock time. I had a catastrophic failure in my MBP HDD after a couple years of use so heavy that if it were an HDD, I simply wouldn't've been able to have done all that work.

by rkalla 15y ago

christoph 15y ago

I'll take reliability over almost anything. I work out on the road 200+ days of 365. A drive failing on me while out in the wilds would be a ~~~~ing catastrophe. I can picture it now, Sunday night, after a long flight, code modified on the flight, not in a remote GIT update in a couple of days... failure in such a scenario would mean i'm out of job. No thanks, I'll take the slow HDD

palish 15y ago
At my last job, they got me an SSD. About a month later, I started coding a new feature for their product. It was a few hours' worth of work, and they were using CVS, and didn't really have a good branching model, so I didn't do any work-in-progress checkins. While I was coding the feature, the SSD failed. This manifested itself via all sorts of strange compiler errors, and so I rebooted. After that, Windows didn't show the SSD anymore, and my code was never seen again. So, while the SSD did save me some time, I effectively lost it all when it failed, due in part to my stupidity, but also due to the fact that you need to understand that if you buy an SSD, you MUST plan for failure. This is not an option, this is "yes-I-will-wear-a-helmet-while-riding-a-motorcycle-at-70-mph". Contrast that with my Dell laptop. I bought it in ~2007, and I've never had a problem with it (except I've had to replace the dim screen a couple times).
- danudey 15y ago
  If you buy storage media, you must plan for failure. Having worked in data centres, I've seen spinning disk drives DOA, die after a week, die in clusters (sequential serials, different machines), etc. SSDs aren't 100% reliable, but neither are HDs. You lost your SSD at an inopportune time, and that sucks, but it could just as easily have been a spinning disk that died, or it could have died after you finished a nightly system backup so you had no data loss at all. It's pure coincidence.
dlsspy 15y ago
> I'll take reliability over almost anything. Then measure reliability by IO operation instead of wall clock time. I had a catastrophic failure in my MBP HDD after a couple years of use so heavy that if it were an HDD, I simply wouldn't've been able to have done all that work.