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@ 2011/07/29Reliability is a sensitive subject, and we've spent many hours on the phone with multiple vendors and their customers trying to conduct our own research based on the SSDs that are currently being used en masse. The only definitive conclusion we can reach right now is that you should take any claim of reliability from an SSD vendor with a grain of salt.
Giving credit where it is due, many of the IT managers we interviewed reiterated that Intel's SLC-based SSDs are the shining standard by which others are measured. But according to Dr. Hughes, there's nothing to suggest that its products are significantly more reliable than the best hard drive solutions. We don’t have failure rates beyond two years of use for SSDs, so it’s possible that this story will change. Should you be deterred from adopting a solid-state solution? So long as you protect your data through regular backups, which is imperative regardless of your preferred storage technology, then we don't see any reason to shy away from SSDs. To the contrary, we're running them in all of our test beds and most of our personal workstations. Rather, our purpose here is to call into question the idea that SSDs are definitely more reliable than hard drives, based on today's limited backup for such a claim.
Hard drives are well-documented in massive studies because they've been around for so long. We'll undoubtedly learn more about SSDs as time goes on. We leave a standing invitation to Intel, OCZ, Micron, Crucial, Kingston, Corsair, Mushkin, SandForce, and Marvell to provide us with internal data demonstrating reliability rates for a more comprehensive investigation.
Giving credit where it is due, many of the IT managers we interviewed reiterated that Intel's SLC-based SSDs are the shining standard by which others are measured. But according to Dr. Hughes, there's nothing to suggest that its products are significantly more reliable than the best hard drive solutions. We don’t have failure rates beyond two years of use for SSDs, so it’s possible that this story will change. Should you be deterred from adopting a solid-state solution? So long as you protect your data through regular backups, which is imperative regardless of your preferred storage technology, then we don't see any reason to shy away from SSDs. To the contrary, we're running them in all of our test beds and most of our personal workstations. Rather, our purpose here is to call into question the idea that SSDs are definitely more reliable than hard drives, based on today's limited backup for such a claim.
Hard drives are well-documented in massive studies because they've been around for so long. We'll undoubtedly learn more about SSDs as time goes on. We leave a standing invitation to Intel, OCZ, Micron, Crucial, Kingston, Corsair, Mushkin, SandForce, and Marvell to provide us with internal data demonstrating reliability rates for a more comprehensive investigation.
