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LordHeini

I gave up thinking about working live of SSDs.

While I know that SSDs will die eventually, this has yet to happen to any of my private drives.

Some of my drives are over 10 years old and still work something unheard of when it comes to rotating rust.

And those are regularly used too some with ridiculous uptimes measured in years.

The drives I replaced where changed for capacity reasons and not wear.

Our company runs a bunch of servers with SSDs and even there they hold up pretty well. The last error was caused by a faulty controller some months ago.

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> something unheard of when it comes to rotating rust.

That's false.

I have a dozen original disks from 1988-1994 PCs that are still working to this day, and much more from the late 90's-early 00's.

Correct me, but maybe the hard disk drives from that era are more reliable because of the low bit density ? And also survivor bias.

It would be survivor bias if I ignored the failing disks. However, all of these are from machines which are in my family from the beginning. I don't have a precise tracking of all the HDDs we ever had, but I remember maybe 4-5 of out of maybe 20 failing over the course of ~30yrs, which is not incredibly awesome, but far from ‶unheard of″.

It depends more on manufacturer/series/batch. In my experience good HDDs easily last 10+ years.

That guy was claiming 34 years of use. The disks would be incredibly low capacity compared to today.

You also tend to see a higher rate of failure in the first few years which then drops off over time

I have multiple consumer grade drives made in 2008-2010 that have been used a lot and have more than 7 years of recorded time of the head flying over the platters and they still work fine. Some with zero reallocated sectors and others with 1-10 in the last decade. But the number hasn't changed for 3+ years in any drive so it doesn't bother me.

Before you say it, of course I keep backups of everything. That's why I still use decade old hardware without much worry.

i have two NAS 3TB WD Red drives that are about 10 years old and still going stong

I have 5 external SSD's that I use for backups (crucial brand), none more than 8 years old and 3 of the 5 have failed completely - luckily I keep multiple backups in multiple places, but no one should be lulled into a false sense of security with these things. They will and do fail, and often at the worst possible time. It sometimes keeps me up worrying if I have enough redundant backups in place.

I have never had an internal SSD fail. But I have had a SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD die after about 14 months. Looking at the reviews a ton of people have had the same thing happen to them.

External SSD's seem to be significantly less reliable. My theory is manufacturers are only designing them for short burst of data transfer. I often transfer 100's of gigabytes at a time and these external drives get extremely hot when doing so.

Can you post model numbers? I've never had good experiences with Crucial SSDs (internal or exteral) compared to Samsung, SanDisk and Intel. I've always bought the higher end models and not run an M.2 SSD in a small external enclosure like some do.

I've had one external SSD fail. No internal ones. Guessing there's a difference in how they're built.

We had two SSDs with high reliability ratings fail for us sequentially in a RAID array in a server, causing partial data loss. It definitely happens.

> two SSDs with high reliability ratings fail for us sequentially in a RAID array in a server,

Happens all the time when you buy storage in batches. We learned a lesson, go through 3-4 suppliers and split your orders over a three month period. Buying from one place in bulk is just guaranteeing data loss in your future.

I know that this idea nugget comes up time and time again when discussing drives, but I'm working on large storage systems for over 10 years now and dealing with the drives and their reliability and have yet to see such an occurrence.

I've dealt with deployed systems that had (in many different clusters) a total of upwards of 100K HDDs and also with 10K SSDs and for extended periods.

I saw tons of drive failures of many types but never even once did I see two or more drives of the same batch fail soon one after the other.

It's not so much batch these days as conditions.

Individual sellers probably use the same shipping method for every order and they may order in large batches which are transported at the same time. Although SSDs are a bit more resilient, hard temperature spikes in a single batch won't be detected after shipping. In the past, we would do this for hard drives because although parked heads are safe, high G-loads could actually unpark a head.

Yeah I found this out post-incident from the Backblaze blog, which I read pretty religiously but this particular nugget of info escaped me.

There has been a case of a firmware bug, which caused SSDs to fail after a fixed amount of power-on time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148. There are some discussions of how RAID disks may serially fail, which shouldn't be inherent to SSDs.

It literally happened to HN's drives which is kind of ironically funny.

What kind of data loss? Some bits get flipped, whole sectors became garbage, or all zeros?

With SSD failures its commonly that the drive no longer works at all and the data loss is between your last backup and now.

Whole drive failure. Likely the controller died.

I had a kingston drive go bad. It failed catastrophically, it did not degrade or become read-only. I lost everything on the drive.

Since then I don't buy off-brand drives. I usually use samsung drives and have had no problems.

> Since then I don't buy off-brand drives

Off-brand? Did you know Kingston produces >60% of world's DRAM and >20% of SSDs?

Isn't it Kingston though who doesn't actually manufacture any chips?

I was fairly sure Kingston just slap their brand any old rubbish and sell it.

They buy from Kioxia and Sandisk who are not exactly off-brand either.

60% is highly unlikely

I made a mistake with "produces". The stat is specifically from here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220906005155/en/Kin... The title is actually "top third-party DRAM module supplier in the world".

I wonder is this "third-party" ranking meaningful. All first-party Samsung/Micron(Crucial)/Hynix ships a lot of modules and OEMs like Lenovo generally adopt them. I agree that Kingston is one of the top brands.

Same happened to me with a Samsung 850 EVO still under warranty. The only real "solution" is backups, backups, backups. Always has been.

When shopping around I usually consult the SSD spreadsheet to find the specs I want. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcr...

I stick to Samsung for PCIE4 and TLC+Marvel for anything else.

I've only had an old OCZ Agility 3 64gb die, but it had a cruel life of being a cctv storage drive and still lasted about 8 years.

My samsung 970 EVO threw bad blocks at me and destroyed windows install... at 90-something life left too

Kingston is definitely not an off-brand drive.

Anecdotally I've had more Samsung drives fail on me than any other brand. Everything from OEM drives to retail EVO drives.

We had that on Samsungs, just drive invisible to system, 850, 860, PRO and EVO and I suspect newer too, we just didn't had any fail yet

I've only had early Intel SSDs die on me. But they were early ones that were low capacity and cheap to backup.

Adding onto the other comments here, this is not my experience at all. If a "spinning rust" harddrive makes it past a year or two, it seems to go on basically indefinitely. I have a drive from 2009 in active use, plus six (out of six) just about at ten years old in a NAS that get scrubbed monthly and have no errors. I've also had several that were around that age and only got replaced for performance or space reasons.

I've only had one fail several years in, and I'm pretty sure it was environmentals (smoke) that did it in.

I have a bunch of 3.5” external spinning hard drives, which are about 5 years at this point. Contrary to internet legends that that’s a recipe for data loss and really they should be in a NAS checking their integrity 24/7, they exhibit no data corruption whatsoever. (I do verify that periodically.)

For us in heavy write load lifetime ("till zero wear level indicator") is around 4-5 years (with some as short as 2), but I had case of personal SSD dropping bad blocks with 95% life left.

We do have some that sit at 1% life left and refuse to die tho

> Some of my drives are over 10 years old and still work something unheard of when it comes to rotating rust.

Not at all unheard of! HDDs tend to fail young, or last a very long time.

The oldest working hard drive I have is in my SPARCstation10, so they're about 30 years old now.

In my ZFS home server nearly all the drives are from its original build in 2010, so over 12 years old now. I had to replace one drive early in the life of that system (year 2-ish, forgot exactly) and the rest are going strong.

I've been lucky with SSDs too. I have only had one fail on me (OCZ). Over the same period of time I have had 4x 2TB drives fail.

The hard drives were for bulk storage too. The SSDs have been system drives.

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