Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

Jade — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:34:42 GMT

i would please like to know the weight difference between an SDD and an average HDD (say 160 GB)?

can anybody (in this blue planet) help? the issue is important for me, as weight is top priority in my buying criterions. I am actually considering buying an E4300.

thanks for your help,

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

Sam Kaufman — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:26:19 GMT

What of these new SSDs for a Dell D630?

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

JD — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:53:48 GMT

My Dell (Sandisk) 32GB SSD failed after 8 months (in a Dell D630). I was able to recover some of the files. The bad sectors were primarily in the OS files. In the morning, I had an operating computer. In the afternoon, Vista was stuck infinitely loading. Diagnostics threw an error code, which was apparently a dead drive code. I guess I am part of the unlucky few....

Now I am nervous about the replacement because it is refurbished. How exactly do they refurbish an SSD? How much were the cells used by the prior user? No way for me to know. I don't want to spend the money on a new drive but I cannot afford another 50+ hours running diagnostics and re-doing the OS, files and programs. :-(

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

John — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:05:46 GMT

Well I just got a XPS 1330 with the new Samsung Sata II 64GB SSD (Ultra-High Performance). This thing is crazy fast!! It reads twice as fast as the Sata I SSD drive. It can boot up Vista in 24 seconds!!

Here is a comparison between Sata I and Sata II on the same 1330 notebook.

PCMark05 Startup: 52MB/s vs. 24MB/s

HDTach: 125MB/s vs. 48MB/s

PCMark05 Score: 7,619 vs. 6,309

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

Rene — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:23:16 GMT

Oh no! I just ordered my XPS 1330 system and it's in production. Now I learn that I spent over $600 for a drive that is on par with a 5400 rpm HDD. This is NOT exceptional!

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

John — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:26:55 GMT

Since the new drives are Sata II instead of Sata I, will Dell use a different motherboard in the 1330 or is the existing mobo Sata II compatible?

Also, is there any update on the release of these? The M6300 has had the Ultra speed drives for 3 weeks now. The Thinkpad X300 has had them for more than 7 weeks. I was trying to hold out for the 1330 but I am about to give up and grab the X300.

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

andreas — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:15:41 GMT

I'm glad to hear tha,t too. But what is more interesting than hoaxes:

When will the "Dell Flash Ultra Performance SSD" be available in Europe?

"...We'll roll this drive out in the coming weeks..."(Sarah) is a bit vague.

Looking forward

Andreas

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

Mark Anderson — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:18:10 GMT

I had to return my laptop after the SSD failed after 3 weeks of use. I had to call Dell four times, 3 weeks later it was resolved. A note to Dell,your technical support email support is terrible. I emailed support several times and never had a reply back. This experience has certainly made me think twice about ordering from Dell again.

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

John Van H — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:05:28 GMT

Curious that there are no REAL numbers in this comment. In fact I have had experience with SSD's over the last 14 years. The technology is always described in glowing terms like those of Craig above. And in fact the advantages Craig parrots are mostly true. Whereas there are some significant issues that are rarely mentioned.

1) Flash erasing is NOT that fast. This is a surprise to many - they figure that if it is non-mechanical it will be nearly instant. Nope. The access time is incredible compared to moving a head and platter. But the flash cells are not quite so fast at reading, writing and especially erasing. This is where they have to do some tricks (eg. block erase) to make up for this shortness.

2) Cell lifetime is limited. They do another trick called wear leveling to minimize this issue. While it may seem like not that big of a deal to have 100k cycles the way windows treats the swap file may make that object nearer than you expect.

3) Bit parity. Like in most media there is some chance of bits getting lost. So there is some built in error detection and correction. However, since Flash is (as admitted by all) MUCH more expensive than HDD they are not as willing to devote quite so many bits in this effort. So historically corruption has been an issue - especially for those companies early in their shipping phase (like Samsung).

4) When you put these together and it's evident that your data is not locked in a single location on the drive. In fact each time you make a change to a file it will MOST likely end up in an entirely differnt part of the drive. The drive controller has to keep track of a very complicated map of where that file is - a map which may start out logical but certainly doesn't stay that way. Oh yes, and the map will be locaed in different areas too!! Now when that data gets moved it is subject to corruption. Worse, when the map get moved it to is subject to corrption. But when IT gets corrupted you can very quickly make a very expensive solid state brick.

It seems each company ends up learning these lessons on it's own. Someday Samsung flash will be great. But I am not at all suprised that there is more fallout than expected. I am a little suspicious that there are no actual numbers in this rebuttal. And so while 10, 20 or 30 is probably a high number I think that the real number is probably much higher than Dell or its customers would have expected too.

re: Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

MIke Scott — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:49:23 GMT

I have five of the SSD laptops in 1330 XPS trim. They are used 10-12 hrs a day. No problems for the last four months guess I should have gotten at least one bad one. Maybe someone needs to do thier homework before engaging thier mouth.