Quote Originally Posted by johnw View Post
Of course we cannot have good statistics on 5 year reliability of SSDs (although we can make good guesses based on tests and data we do have). But that is not the point. The article referenced is pure propaganda since it purports to say that SSDs have a high one or two year failure rate. There is some reasonable data already on one or two year failure rates of SSDs, so it is absurd to give any credibility to the kind of anecdotal evidence the article mentions.



It absolutely should NOT be given credence. Anecdotal evidence is useless, or worse than useless, when looking at reliability. A careful statistical study with good methodology is required.

The problem with anecdotal evidence is that there are millions of SSDs in use. Even if the annual failure rate is only 0.1%, there should be thousands of SSDs failing each year. All anecdotal evidence tells us is that there are indeed failures -- it gives us no useful information on the failure rate. The useful information that anecdotal evidence might provide is failure modes and how companies deal with warranties. But the referenced article provides nothing like that.
If you prefer a more careful study. You will have to wait about 1-2 years before the following study will finish:

I have bought 2 of each of the following:

OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-120G
Corsair Force CSSD-F120GB2-BRKT
OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G
Corsair Performance 3 Series CSSD-P3128GB2-BRKT
Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1
SAMSUNG 470 Series MZ-5PA128/US
Intel 510 Series (Elm Crest) SSDSC2MH120A2K5
Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH160G2K5
Kingston SSDNow V+ Series SNVP325-S2B/128GB


and am going to subject them to the following actions:

Using a Debian 6.0 Linux box running off of a single 8GB MicroSD card, an undervolted Phenom2, 2GB of DDR2, and a twin set of areca ARC-1231ML-2G PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Cards, I will perform a continuous series of reads and writes to the drives until they fail and record exactly how many writes it can actually survive. [The other 3 cores will be dedicated to WCG]

Any questions or comments before I begin the test on May 24, 002011 @ 12noon EST?