Worth Reading?
From a single manager they have seen 20% of their notebook returned on average, and 30% of their SSD equipped notebooks. Not all of those are for failures, but about 20% of those SSD equipped notebooks are being returned due solely to SSD drive failures.
The other 10% is because the customers aren’t seeing the real-world speed enhancements which are really only found when the seek time of the drive is put to the test. No word whether the failure is coming in the memory chips or in the controller chips in the drives, they also aren’t giving up who this manufacturer is, who the manufacturer of the SSD drives is, or really any of the details that would allow us to point a finger.
One little statistic they did add in is that a mere 2% of standard HDD based notebooks have been returned due to drive failure. Some other facts that we do know is that Samsung is the most prolific manufacturer of SSD drives and Dell/Alienware, Apple, and Lenovo are the 3 most likely candidates for having enough info regarding SSD drives in notebooks to be able to form a report of the likes that this info is based off of, so which one is it?
[via electronista]
Hmmm, SSD looks good on paper. Too bad. After reading the post, clicking on the Amazon link below to the Transcend 32GB SSD, and seeing the price I will not be picking one up any time soon.
That’s essentially the biggest problem with SSD, the sticker shock. It’s actually a superior storage system in many ways, but until the price drops to something reasonable it’s going to be a no-go. I’m rather curious about the statistics on here though. I’ve owned several notebooks, and all of them but one died of dead hard drives at some point or another (often multiple times as I’d replace the HD, and have the new one die at some point). One of the systems I replaced before I was ready to though because a year or so after I replaced the first HD that died the power supply fried and blew out the motherboard. Other than that one, every other laptop I’ve ever had died of obsolescence, but every last one also went through several HDs, and always outside the warranty period (if only just).
Very interested to find out what the long term reliability of SSD drives is. With a traditional HD the long term reliability is what kills you every time, not talking inside of 6 months, or even a year, but looking at anything past the one year mark. If they’re dieing early on, that sounds like a simple case of bad components and is actually good because they should still be under warranty, but if they fail after working ok for 6 months or more, that’s more of an issue.