Comment by portman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by portman | Hacker News Reader

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A couple of additional points about my abysmal 8/8 failure rate:

  - These were in 8 different machines in 8 different locations.
  - 7 were in desktops, 1 was a laptop
  - All were running Windows
  - All purchased from NewEgg
  - Most of these were gifts for other people.

(I may be slightly crazy, but I don't have 8 computers.)

After this saga, I've concluded that there are probably two root causes leading to high failure rates:

(1) Something about installing an after-market SSD in a desktop, probably related to power fluctuations, increases the likelihood of failure.

(2) NewEgg only offers a 30-day warranty on their SSDs. You can't even purchase a third-party extended warranty. So I suspect that you'll see a higher failure rate from NewEgg purchases than from a merchant who offers a 2- or 3-year warranty. (But NewEgg's prices are so damn good!)

I should also say that the SSDs that I have purchased with laptops - 2 from Dell (2008, 2009) and 1 from IBM (2009) have not failed.

As for (1), unless you specifically go purchase a quality PSU, the PSU you get in a pre-built machine is usually utter trash as far as output quality is considered. (This is probably a fault of the ATX standard, which frankly allows too much leeway. Many parts that could otherwise use the voltages provided by the PSU have to include their own power regulation circuitry simply because the direct PSU output is too noisy) It's a good idea to build your own computer from newegg or similar just to know the PSU you'll get.

Other than that, there's no difference if the SSD is plugged in by "a trained professional" or yourself.

Agreed. Never, ever skimp on the PSU, even for a budget build. It's a false economy (which, in the worst case scenario, could result in you replacing the PSU and every other piece of hardware too).

If you're not sure if your PSU is good or not, pick it up and see how heavy it is. If it has a fair bit of heft, it's probably good. If it feels light, it's definitely bad.

Did you verify the authenticity of the drives? It sounds odd that that they were limited to a NewEgg warranty without a manufacturer's warranty.

Every SSD I see on Newegg mentions that it has a 3 year manufacturer's warranty.

Yeah, I think he may be confusing "return policy" and "warranty". Just about all SSDs (at least from the major companies like OCZ, Corsair, Intel) will have a 3 year warranty from the manufacturer.

(1) I think that's it. You could get a cheap oscilloscope card for looking at the power grid quality. It seems it is really bad on there.

You could even make an script that analyzes if the wave shape is too bad, and if so store the surroundings of the power glitches. You can do that with a beagle board DSP, almost free.

Maybe you shut down or power on a lot of computers at the same time, start engines, whatever. It does not make sense your SSDs failure rate(15 days, come on!!).

These were in 8 different computers in 8 different people's houses (friends and colleagues).

So something specific to my environment is not a factor.

My experience has been different, knock on wood. My X25-M has been going for about a year now. It has two bad sectors, but nothing catastrophic. I back up all my files every day with duplicity anyway, though.

Is this really the standard case for SSD's? I know they have a certain number of writes, but didn't know the failure rate was this high. It seems strange that all the drives you got did not have warranties. On Newegg I'll sometimes buy parts that seem like really great deals. Eventually they will either brake/perform poorly. I haven't cheaped out on hardware since then. I just can't stand the hassle of bad hardware anymore.

Those drives didn't fail to running out of write cycles -- they simply wouldn't have had time to do that by now. They failed because SSD's are still quite new devices that haven't seen the kind of decades of slow improvement like most other consumer hardware.

Most SSD crashes are because the firmware managed to corrupt something, and thus you can fix most failed SSD's by reflashing their firmware, assuming the drive has a method of doing this without special equipment. (doing so would, of course, erase the entire drive)

The SSD I got from NewEgg had an extended warranty offer. The only time I've ever accepted one. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227...

Offtopic, but you could get a third-party warranty from SquareTrade.

> All were running Windows

It's too much to hope for that Windows is the common factor here, isn't it?

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