[Stuart Wright]

I had a new Windows 7 PC a couple of years ago and chose two 128Gig Crucial SSDs mirrored for a fast and secure OS drive.
After less than two years, both drives have failed.
The first started blue screening and regular CHKDSK operations on bootup.
I fell back to the single drive and that has now died completely.
I will be avoiding SSDs in future.
My experience 100% bad.

[bobbymax]

Didn't you contact Crucial for info or warranty issue?

I'd like to know why they failed ( perhaps an update or something?) as I was about to pull the trigger on a 128GB one myself.

[EndlessWaves]

Plenty of people out there have had two hard drives fail, perhaps you'd better avoid that technology as well? Yours were not independent failures, they were connected the same controller and presumably the same power supply, and both were the same model - that's not good data to judge the reliability of an entire technology on.

Hard drives and SSDs are cutting edge technologies and both have relatively high failure rates (1% per year or more) so there's no such thing as reliable storage - if the data can't be lost then it needs to be backed up independently. RAID is great for keeping the system up and running when a drive fails, but it's not backup because they're not independent and some causes will make both drives unreadable at once.

[Stuart Wright]

Sorry I should have prefaced my experiences based on building and running my own PCs for over 20 years.
I've never had significant issues with any of the traditional hard drives I've used whether they be Western Digital (raptors being my previous drive of choice), Seagate or Maxtor.
Luckily I had backed up my data to my mirrored 1Tb WD d: drive which has worked flawlessly for two years solid in the same machine.
I'm reporting my own experiences. You can defend SSDs all you like, it doesn't change my experiences.

[maddogb]

Originally Posted by Stuart Wright

Sorry I should have prefaced my experiences based on building and running my own PCs for over 20 years.
I've never had significant issues with any of the traditional hard drives I've used whether they be Western Digital (raptors being my previous drive of choice), Seagate or Maxtor.
Luckily I had backed up my data to my mirrored 1Tb WD d: drive which has worked flawlessly for two years solid in the same machine.
I'm reporting my own experiences. You can defend SSDs all you like, it doesn't change my experiences.

has someone hacked this account??
in another post he complains his raid mirror ain't being recognised in windows only to discover the driver hadn't been installed which would have shown in device manager the first place you look for missing hardware

[cokker]

Crucial SSD's are not all SSD's...

Crucial's M4 series are one of the most reliable, unless you got a bad batch (RMA?) you're doing something wrong.

[LJx]

SSD's are still have unreliable controllers and if these were bought a few years ago then this doesn't surprise me but maybe you have warranty on them

[drummerjohn]

It's the risk you take buying first generations of anything. It doesn't write off the technology.

[Indiana Jones]

We started using SSDs in certain products at work about 2 years ago and since then we have had pretty much all of them back due to drive failures but we were using Sandisk drives, we switched to using Intel SSDs about a year ago and so far not a single return.

Got some samples of the new Intel 710 in a few weeks back, not sure if we are going to switch to them just yet as the price difference is huge but on the plus side we got to keep them so one is now at the heart of my media centre

[maddogb]

from my perspective this is very interesting stuff here.
I was one of the people who was actually waiting for ssds to become affordable for a couple of years before the release of the new ocz core series which were the first big splash i suppose.
When they hit the shops i bought 2 of the 30GB ones at a cost of £115 each, i tried to find the date which i bought them but dabs website only goes back 36 months on accounts so its defo over 3 years.
Now back then we knew nothing of partition alignment etc but we did know ssds were not going to be as robust as mech hdds so i took the liberty of performing a few of my own tweaks to minimise writes of the drive, ie disabling swap file, turning off indexing etc etc.
now these drives are still going strong, one is in daily use on my lounge htpc which simply boots from the ssd but does have media portal on there which obviously writes to its own database etc but the tv timeshifting/recording is written to the larger mech hdd in the system.
Now is it too far a stretch to say it is actually Windows which is wrecking all these drives?

[EndlessWaves]

Originally Posted by maddogb

Now is it too far a stretch to say it is actually Windows which is wrecking all these drives?

From a sample of 2/2 drives? Definitely.

I think a lot of the problem is people are getting confused between reliability and lifespan. SSDs have a limited lifespan - they can only write to their cells a certain numbers of times - and they'll eventually become read only.

So anyone who has read a little about SSDs and has one fail on them could easily remember reading something about their SSD's limited lifespan and think that was the same thing as the failure. Hence all the doubts about SSD 'reliability'.

Articles with reliability and return rates numbers generally show them to be as good as or better than hard drives.

As for windows features like indexing, their write activity is relatively low. If you look at the search index files for example (default location C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search) you'll probably find it's a couple of hundred megabytes at most. You're talking about a gigabyte per day before you even need to start worrying about lifespan.

[maddogb]

haha sarcasm suits you.
but true in order to find some info we could really do with a few more samples
question is does anyone else have a 3 year old drive we can run ssd life on? i have actually seen a fairly high number of failures in machines where the user hasnt taken any/or only a few steps to minimise writes to the drives.
as i said the only drives i have had chance to monitor closely seem to be reaching a grand old age whereas a lot of friends seem to be suffering failure rates much higher than mech hdds.
might be interesting to know if they are just plain wearing out

[Bugbait]

Originally Posted by maddogb

Now is it too far a stretch to say it is actually Windows which is wrecking all these drives?

Unlikely based on what I've read on the Internet coupled with personal experience. In the first couple of generations reliability was an issue for many brands. Going back 3 years or more Intel was by far the most reliable on the market and arguably still is. Anandtech, who use their drives in a far harsher manner than most consumers have rated Intel and Sumsang as the most reliable SSD's they've used. Having tested many models on the market I lend some weight to their opinion.

Personally I had an Intel G2 from release and after over 2 years of daily use it showed 98% of it's life remaining based it's internal audit (using Intel tool to read). This was my only OS drive for over 2 years and also ran World of Warcraft (frequent reads and writes from many client mods). My PC is used for up to several hours every day.

The Intel was moved to the wife's laptop and was replaced by an OCZ Agility 3 for my main desktop. More recently I installed a Samsung 830 as the OS drive and the Agility 3 has been repurposed as the dedicated gaming drive. Both drives are still functioning perfectly and show 100% life remaining for the Samsung (only a few months old) and 99% for the Agility 3 I expected more wear on the Agility 3 with the Sandforce write amplification but it doesn't seem to be the case (yet).

The only OS tweak I ever use is turning the swapfile off since it aids performance. I use this tweak regardless of HDD type and it was mainly beneficial for performance back when the swapfile would be hosted on my mechanical drives.

[maddogb]

strange one that because although you put it up as an argument against it sorta supports the theory i'm leaning towards ie you did tweak windows by disabling the swap file.
unfort. the mrs is off work at the mo with a duff knee so i cant get near my htpc to run ssdlife on the ocz. will try and get there later when im finished work.

[Bugbait]

Originally Posted by maddogb

strange one that because although you put it up as an argument against it sorta supports the theory i'm leaning towards ie you did tweak windows by disabling the swap file.

It's a tweak I've been using for a long time and started many years before SSD's were even available. So yes, it's a Windows tweak but one that I always apply regardless of storage type. I think the Intel I moved to my wife's laptop has dropped 1-2% in almost a year since I installed it for her and everything runs off it.

[maddogb]

yeah pretty much same with me, apart from when i needed it cos i couldn't afford lots of ram lol then i used to create a fat16 partition on the start of the drive and locate the swapfile on there.

what sort of use does your wifes laptop get in comparison to your machine?

[Bugbait]

Back when I used a swap file I always made sure it was in a contiguous block.

Wife mainly uses the laptop for general browsing, some downloads, photos and graphics work (latter 2 are the main ones). Some decent size files but most don't change too often. She's a light to medium user and does more with her iPad.

For OS and general use I think most consumers will find the lifespan of an SSD to be easily 5 or more years barring any faults. With my current usage it should be over 10 years with plenty to spare. Using an SSD (the non-enterprise ones anyway) for holding large temporary files (eg. AV studio stuff) will likely kill it pretty quick but then for that kind of work you're really looking at HDD's or enterprise SSD's if your pockets are really deep.

Don't recall seeing any posts from users who have complained about their SSD NAND wearing out but time will tell. All faults have always been due to buggy firmware or dodgy controllers.