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Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

Also, most of the time, when SSD's fail, they become read-only, which is a far better outcome than a spinner starting to scratch its plates. So even if SSD's had short lifespans it wouldn't be as destructive.

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most of the time

All the crashes I've read about on the web were fatal failures with total data loss. I hope it'll get better.

Well, here's one story on the web for you about SSD failure without total data loss: I've had an SSD that just refused to write anymore, but all the data was still readable. All I had to do was buy another SSD, dd the old SSD's data over to it, and go on my merry way.

Same thing happened to me, and at the time I had no idea that that was how SSDs failed - it was my OS disk, and suddenly I couldn't sudo.

Popped in a bootable USB, and had the data copied off and a replacement SSD in within a couple of hours.

I wouldn't depend on that failure mode, but it's a nice feature.

My first, only, and last-until-hell-freezes-over SSD went crazy last week, after a series of bizarre kernel panics that now appear to relate entirely to the SSD (machine is fine after a reinstall). Following a final reboot the Macbook's firmware displayed a "missing startup folder" icon. On flying home I discover that several GB from the start of the drive has gone missing entirely (check out http://i.imgur.com/riK4CBt.gif -- grey is good, black is zero blocks). Never again relying on a disk technology that doesn't respond to a hammer when it's dying.

One data point is a poor basis for decision making.

Right. So I could drop $2-3k on gaining experience from a meaningful sample size, all the while risking more lost business days, or I could just believe all those anecdotes it took me close to half a decade to convince myself to ignore. I've got bigger problems than seek latency, will retry in a couple more years.

Maybe you could try making backups next time?

Would certainly be smarter than banking on the reliability of a single HDD.

Unfortunately you can't back up billable hours, and carrying an entirely separate laptop or disk on the expectation that your main one will fail seems a bit too weird, especially when robust alternatives exist

As an hourly contractor as well, I back up everything to the cloud and have at least two laptops in a 'ready' state. Trusting hardware to work is... brave.

meh. That's what backups are for? Have you ever restored from time machine? In the 5 years I've lost 3 or 4 mechanical drives in my MBP's and only lost the amount of time it took to buy a new HD and restore.

I'm much happier with the day-to-day SSD speeds and I figure if the drive lasts a year or so I'm still on par with my usual HD burn out rate.

If you have a laptop with a optical disk drive, you can remove the drive and replace it with a second hard drive for backups alone. You can even make it a 1.5TB HDD and use something like Time Machine for multiple version backups that backup all the time. That way you don't have to carry anything.

Most of your billable hours would be saved that way. I also have an external HDD connected to my laptop dock that does automatic backups whenever I connect the laptop to it, and I have crashplan for 'offsite' backups. I don't use my second HDD in my laptop as a backup hard drive although.

Isn't total data loss the default for a mechanical drive failure as well?

I don't think this should be counted as a major weakness of SSDs.

First, no. HDD recovery is expensive but possible in many cases.

Secondly, no one say it should be counted as a weakness, the guy above was just pointing out that it's probably not a strength, as someone above claimed.

Expensive SSD recovery is also an option.

Really?

I've had 4 SSD drives fail across 20 desktops and in all cases the data loss has been total. I've never seen, heck or even heard of, an SSD drive go int read only mode.

Is there some special tinkering you need to do to get one to go into read only mode?

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