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SSDs are meant for boot and application drives where lots of random I/O happens. You wouldn't normally use them in RAID except to RAID0 them for better performa

SSDs are meant for boot and application drives where lots of random I/O happens. You wouldn't normally use them in RAID except to RAID0 them for better performance and more space. Instead of anecdotes about failure rates, it's best to look at data. I don't know of any large-scale studies of SSD reliability, but http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd-failure-rates-compared-to-hard-drives/ http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd-fa... looks at return rates, which correlates with failure rates. Intel's return rate is 0.6%. The other SSDs are 2-3%. Hard drives vary from 1-6% for 1TB and 3-10% for 2TB drives. SSDs are more expensive than hard drives, so their return rates should be higher for the same failure rate (people are more likely to return a broken $300 SSD than a $50 hard drive). The reason many people like SSDs is because they widen the worst bottleneck in modern computers (random disk I/O) by a factor of 10-100. The difference is very noticeable. I highly recommend you try out an SSD as your boot/application drive.

otterley 15y ago
> SSDs are meant for boot and application drives where lots of random I/O happens. You wouldn't normally use them in RAID except to RAID0 them for better performance and more space. Most folks who really care about massive I/O performance are OLTP implementers (i.e. big Oracle/Postgres/MySQL installations). Those people also really care about reliability, so as long as the failure rate of SSDs is non-zero, even with screaming random IOPS capability, they'd be fools not to use some RAID 1 or RAID 5 implementation.
fierarul 15y ago
I'm not entirely certain return rates are a good indicator of failure rates. First, you only return a hard drive if it's under warranty so that gives you a 1-2 years window. Second, if you care about security, you don't really return hard drives. Once bought, unless you are certain everything is encrypted on them, the drives never leave the premises.
- rdl 15y ago
  You can usually get a deal with hw/drive vendors to train and certify your in house staff to declare drives dead and then field destroy with replacement credit.

otterley 15y ago

> SSDs are meant for boot and application drives where lots of random I/O happens. You wouldn't normally use them in RAID except to RAID0 them for better performance and more space. Most folks who really care about massive I/O performance are OLTP implementers (i.e. big Oracle/Postgres/MySQL installations). Those people also really care about reliability, so as long as the failure rate of SSDs is non-zero, even with screaming random IOPS capability, they'd be fools not to use some RAID 1 or RAID 5 implementation.

fierarul 15y ago

I'm not entirely certain return rates are a good indicator of failure rates. First, you only return a hard drive if it's under warranty so that gives you a 1-2 years window. Second, if you care about security, you don't really return hard drives. Once bought, unless you are certain everything is encrypted on them, the drives never leave the premises.

rdl 15y ago
You can usually get a deal with hw/drive vendors to train and certify your in house staff to declare drives dead and then field destroy with replacement credit.