Gizmodo
The whole reason to pay the obscene premium for a SSD is because it's supposed to be way more reliable than your average spinny hard drive. According to an analyst at Avian Securities, however, an unnamed "large computer manufacturer" is having 10 to 20 percent of its flash-based notebooks sent back because of technical failure—and still more are being sent back for not matching purchasers' expectations for a total of 20 to 30 percent of SSD-based notebooks getting the heave-ho. Update: Dell flat-out denies the return rates claimed by Avian Securities, saying "it's just not true."
Keep in mind that the return rate for standard hard drive failures is only about one to two percent. Crave narrows down the most probable manufacturer to be Dell, who pointed out when admitting that SSDs suck for small data packets (like in Outlook) that Samsung is about to drop a new SSD that doesn't cry itself to a slow churn when faced with them. Not exactly an admission, but about the best you could expect out of a flack.
That said, it doesn't really address the whole issue of a 20 percent fail rate, which doesn't exactly stoke the lines with people ready to throw down the platinum card. [Crave]
Comments
Is that bad? I'm only on my 3rd xbox.
Good. Now I hope Apple actually adds a real hard drive over 100gb in the Air. Ipods get 120gb and all the Air can do is 80GB? Weak.
The SSD like the original pricing of the iphone is a nerd tax -especially so after test results indicated a minimal bump is speed and such.
@SchruteBuck:
same here
It aways happens like this. New technology always have problems, just sit back and watch the technology mature, or die out. No need to jump heads first onto the newest latest.
Although, I do love my Eee.
I'm not surprised. An operating system that craps out on a regular basis (you know which one) would be really rough on a SSD.
Solid Snake Disk?
DIAF ;-)
The question that I've always had about SSD's is comparing memory to hard drives.
When anything on a stick of memory goes bad, you replace the entire memory stick.
When a block goes bad on a hard drive, it gets mapped out and you continue on.
When it comes to SSD, I would imagine that it falls somewhere in between. There are going to be SSD failures due to one bit being held hostage by a memory chip and the whole thing will need to be replaced. Error correction and re-mapping may be possible in some cases, but unlike a bad block on a hard drive, the bad bit is always connected.
They'll get more reliable as time goes on, however, I will warn people to be more vigilant about backing the data up.
How is Snake an epic fail? Snake never fails.
Well, I only hope that the "100" ssd drives I have stay 100 and not 80.
@Samifumi: The iPod Classic also has space for a 2-platter 1.8" drive, the Air has space for a 1-platter drive.
@sumocat:
Must be OSX.... I have not crashed on Vista since it came out and I cannot recall the last time I crashed on XP... 2 ~ 3 years ago...
@Leonard Nimrod:
style over functionality, naturally.
@aec007
haha oh yeah, how about my blue screen of death I just got? The cause of the problem? "Windows Vista" I almost shat myself laughing, but hey at least they were up front about it.
Any body else remember the old mac virtual drive utility? I think it was a whopping 1mb on my Mac IIsi.
I'm using an EEE PC with a 4GB SSD drive & WinXP with no problems for 6 months of use. But a friend who has the same model failed within 3 months. I guess we will just have to wait & see what happens. I would have been ok with a 20/40MB miniture HD instead of the SSD too.
Oh yeah, it's of course not likely at all that anyone regrets spending a grand on a mild performance improvement (which every techie knows it is) and tries to get their money back by complaining about some random problem.
@SausageAndOnion: Sounds like the error lies between the keyboard and the chair. :P
Since when was SSD supposed to be more reliable @ data retention? It's more reliable in high shock/vibration but not data retention. If that was the case you would see servers using them.
"The whole reason to pay the obscene premium for a SSD is because it's supposed to be way more reliable than your average spinny hard drive."
Really? I thought it was speed and low power consumption. It looks like the author changed the whole premise of the SSD market just to make his story sound more relevant.
@torched:
Not at all, man, servers have high read/write activity, and not only are SSDs prohibitively expensive to begin with, they tend to not do so well when flashed back and forth over and over again. It still makes sense for servers to run redundant HDDs and risk total platter failure than to spend 4-6X as much $$$ on SSD when it's not any more reliable for day to day applications.
@turbofreak: Beat me to the punch. NEVER put snake with "epic fail." Ain't happenin'.
@Mag: SSD is hardly new technology. It might be for the consumer market but it's been around for a while. Years ago I installed SSD Accelerators on SANs for the purpose of optimizing database transaction logs.
@thebear91: Flash memory has had remapping software for a very long time, refer to DOC (disk on chip) found in the vast majority of pda/phones.
@torched: My understanding is that SSD's are the high endurance form of flash memory, which is reported by the manufacturer to have much higher read/write life spans than HD's. With that said, I never believed those reports. My personal opinion is that flash is not nearly as stable as HD's.
@nutbastard: Again, the high endurance flash type of memory is supposed to have much higher a read/write life then HD's. And, like I said, I don't believe what the manufacture reports.
@Mag: SSD's are not new tech, at least not completely. Flash memory has been around for some time.
I will never cease to chuckle at Snake being shooped into every SSD picture.
I think having the colonel is this picture with his classic "Snake? Snake? SNNNNAAAKKKKEEEE?!?" would be appropriate.
I heard we was dead.
What?
FISSION MAILED
ROFL
Funny... when first announced, everyone was like "IT WILL BE THOUSAND TIMES FASTER"... and then "IT WILL CONSUME FAR LESS" and "IT WILL BE FAR MORE RELIABLE".
Ok ok, technology is still maturing. Still funny anyways.
One more prove it's not worth being an early adopter.
I must also add that I've been dealing with PC computers since PC-XT (and other microcomputers before that), and not ONE hard drive failed on me so far.
My last Desktop (I only have laptops now) had 3HDDs... one SATA and two standard IDEs... and one spare for backup.
i think its mac, but this site will implode if they say anything bad about them. dell has sold maybe 10 SSD machines, 2/10 aint bad LOL.
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