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Comment by xkiwi | Hacker News Reader

In the middle of reading this, I saw a 2TB SSD Advertisement then realized SSD just consumable product, it is just like tires which just change it every 2-3 years, for safety concern.

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Thats the right way of thinking about it but its not really feasible for consumers.

"Oh hey, this Laptop has a SSD drive which is super fast. You will have to replace it every year though and if you dont have a backup strategy you might lose all you data. Did i mention they are quite expensive ?"

You will have to make quite the effort to burn trough a consumer SSD in machine with normal use for a year. 256 GB * 3000 gives a lot of write information.

Indeed, the standard SSD in a consumer-type usage is 7+ years of write.

In theory yes, in practice i have been using SSDs since 2009 and had them both failing (different brands and tech) after about 2 years of daily usage. Now i see i probably use them more than the average consumer, but i cant remember the last time i had a normal HDD fail in one of my machines.

I've seen a number of normal HDD failures. I think that the first one that I've seen, been with a double-5 inch slot hard drive, which was failing to start spinning at times. You've had to turn the PC box abruptly, to make it spin ;)

But as of now, have to see an SSD fail. Longest running that I have now is a Linux box that've been up since Oct/2007. (Heh, cool part about that linux box - there are no moving parts at all - no coolers, no nothing. Even in the power supply ;) )

Sounds cool :) I am not saying i have never seen HDDs fail, but in the almost 20 years i have been computing heavily, it might have been about 3 in my own machines, while i went through 2 SSDs in 4 years. Id still never go back to HDDs as my system drive :)

I've had no hard drive failures in over a decade, but my first SSD (a Crucial M4) failed in about a year. I'm back to reliable hard drives.

Spinning disks share most of that; they're just cheaper per gigabyte and slower. A spinning disk (is not and has never been sufficient to store important data.

At least with SSDs the form factor can be a lot smaller, so we might see slower, cheaper ones appear more often as external drives for true portable backups. Having your data on two SSDs is better than one spinning disk, especially if one of the SSDs is usually unplugged.

I just spent quite some time assisting someone with a 1TB WD drive that was failing after 1 month. No backup strategy, quite expensive.

Can you PM me what brand it is?

'WD' means Western Digital.

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I've had my Intel SSD since 2009, it's only needed to be replaced once, and Intel did it in a week (and I didn't lose any data). SMART warned me that it might fail soon (I think it ran out of remappable sectors), and Intel sent me a free replacement, which has been running fine since.

I got an Intel X25 in early 2010 and used it as my daily dev machine while averaging probably 60 hours a week for tasks like cloning large DBs and parsing gigabytes of log files, and it's still running strong.

Yep, that's what I have too. X25-M, 160 GB. I remember I paid 400 GBP or something for it back then.

Me too, had the 80GB model which failed after 2 years in 2011, got a Crucial M4 since then which starts to get some occasional freezes and write errors.

I also got 2 Supertalent MLC Drives in 2009 for my brother and a friend, both died after ~2 years as well. Now we are all running the Crucial M4 which are fine, for now ;) I love SSDs, have been an evangelist since 2009 but i dont trust their reliability :)

Is this not already the mindset? I worked at a data storage company for a while; everyone knew hard drives fail, because we had so many disks we would have a couple failures just about every day. Everything was designed to be fault-tolerant so we could squeeze the most life out of every spindle, but in the absence of fault-tolerance I'm sure we would have had a spindle retiring schedule.

Are there many companies that do not acknowledge this basic fact of operation?

Not to normal consumers. Crap, I've been on the same set of spinning rust for going on seven years.

Knock on wood :-)

For quite a while, I've been saying that too. We have the SMART data to know when they're wearing, so why don't we treat them like race car tires?

http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2012/11/flash-drives...

I think that's the right way to think about it. And we should have already been treating hard disks that way too.

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