SSD reliability??

Walker34

Hi,
a friend of mine has bought a Crucial 120 gig SSD drive and it has failed on him twice. The first time it was replaced under warranty only after Crucial confirmed it was a hardware failure. Two weeks later the replacement drive has failed again......BSOD and not being recognized on boot. How reliable are these drives.They perform really well when they do work.....but Im just wary after two failures in such a short period. Has the original bug been sorted with these devices or are they still prone to failure. Now he is waiting to hear if they will replace the second drive.

Tea_Bag

he got really really unlucky

SSD's are more reliable than HDD's, and will certainly outlast your PC (unless its a first gen one, or you get unlucky)

I think the stats for returned/failed crucial SSD's is around 1%.

Is the second SSD definitely at fault? whats the BSOD error state? when you say not recognised at boot, do you mean the BIOS doesn't read it at all? What motherboard is it and what SATA port is it plugged into?

Monotype

Sounds unlucky alright but these things happen. Crucial's are one of the most reliable. Top tier for reliability are Intel's drives but the price is just a bit too high in my opinion.

He might want to check that there's nothing destroying the SSD - e.g., a bad PSU.

TheDoc

I had nothing but problems with my OCZ one, a brand I'd definitly avoid going forward. Even their RMA process is a pain.

They keep directing me to do a firmware upgrade, which hasnt worked, and its just causing BSOD now when trying to turn on with it plugged in. Out the PC is fine.

I bought a Crucial one, fingers crossed.

Anyone I know personally who has bought one, has had them returned for replacements relatively quickly : /

Monotype

TheDoc wrote: »

Anyone I know personally who has bought one, has had them returned for replacements relatively quickly : /

M4s?

TheDoc

O no sorry SSD's in general, although we were all early adopters : /

I bought a M4 there with a new Motherboard ( see other threads for mobo lols) and have it sitting in a box waiting on motherboard replacement to arrive. I'd be lying if I said I wasnt nervy about the whole ordeal

I just got another mai lback from OCZ after trying the firmware upgrade, which kept BSOD's my PC, asking them to please organise an RMA ( this is going on 6 months now) and they replied with another link

To upgrade the firmware

I'm going to give it one more lash tonight and then I'm getting back onto overclockers, I'm not being brick walled by this shower anymore, I paid my money to overclockers so they can replace it

Monotype

If you already upgraded the firmware, then it's probably not going be fixed by upgrading it again... that's assuming you can even see the drive to upgrade the firmware.

They're probably getting a lot of drives returned so doing their best to keep down the numbers. I don't think I had that kind of trouble with OCZ when I sent them some RAM a few years back.

Walker34

Interesting comments.....they range from really reliable to a heap of junk. My friend would occupy the latter camp.:-0 I am tempted myself to take the plunge and buy one, but would like to feel a little more confident in them. Is there a major problem with using them like hot swapping or something that would make them fail, or are they reasonably robust?

aperture_nuig

I think it really depends on the brand, and even the particular model in some cases, to determine how reliable they usually are. In the OP it was mentioned that it was a crucial drive that was failing, which are usually the brand suggested on here, so even if you can find user feedback on a drive, it's just they're experience of a drive but like every other component in a PC a certain amount will fail.

briany

I have an OCZ agility 128 GB as a second SSD for games and things and it's been fine for me so far although I'm not getting the best out of it being plugged into a SATA II port. I did however plump for a crucial m4 64 GB as my boot drive which I'm glad I did as they're some of the best regarded and widely used SSDs on the market. SSDs are definitely worth it if you like having a fully loaded desktop from 15 seconds every time after pushing the power button.

Outkast_IRE

If your worried about reliability then INTEL is the only make SSD to buy,
they suffer the lowest failure rates and intel actually care if it fails on you they will want the device back to see what went wrong and they will give you a replacement very quickly.

I have my intel SSD 1 year now and its as good as ever and its getting serious usage up to 12 hours a day at times.

Intel are honestly best for reliability in SSD.

MarkyTheLips

I'm going to give two Mushkin 120GBs a go, have heard some good things and the GB per € is pretty sweet (depending where you look). Was pretty horrified by OCZ's reputation with them so avoiding.

Tea_Bag

why not just go for a 256gb Samsung 830 or crucial m4?

they're around €210 now!!

just a couple of weeks ago I paid €160 for my 128gb

vibe666

MarkyTheLips wrote: »

Was pretty horrified by OCZ's reputation with them so avoiding.

no problems here with 2x 60gb OCZ Agility 3's in RAID0.

OS (Win7 x64) was installed on 1st April (possibly ironically? ) 2011 and in use more or less daily since then.

the 8gb of OCZ Platinum RAM I had in it on the other hand was woeful. 3 RMA's in total and an eventual refund after about 6 months.

these SSD's will be my last pice of OCZ hardware as a result.

MarkyTheLips

Tea_Bag wrote: »

why not just go for a 256gb Samsung 830 or crucial m4?

they're around €210 now!!

just a couple of weeks ago I paid €160 for my 128gb

Hate that!! I need two SSDs for two different systems otherwise that's pretty tempting. Coming in at €75 each so I can't go wrong, famous last words

Beez

Samsung 830's and Intel SSD's are regarded as highly reliable.

The main problem with SSD's compared to hard drive is when they fail usually thats it, everything gone, where you may have a chance to retreive files if a hard drive starts to fail.