Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?

No: I've had my Intel X-25M for over 2 years and its holding up great.

Yes, due to firmware bugs.

On my 3rd X25-M. First was a g1 that ceased to be recognized by the OS as a device after 9months, the second was a g2 that had much degraded performance and then started showing many errors, corrupt data and the like so I stopped using it. Just prior it was in a RAID 0 array for a year with another x25m g2 that I pulled apart after degraded perf and had a feeling something like this would happen.I now have a single x25m g2 (the other one from the array) with the OS X trim patch installed.

Waiting for a MBP update to ship with lion and dual sata rev 3 (currently its only one rev 2 and one rev 3) so I can RAID 0 two SF2500 based SSDs like the vertex 3 pro.

I'm using a RAID0 of two Intel 160 GB multi-level cells. One I bought in the middle of 2009, one at the end of 2009.

Both are under constant use (that raid is the only drive in my development machine) and they run fine so far.

At home I'm running two 256GB multi-level SSDs also from Intel, also in a RAID0. I bought them last December after having one Corsair SSD in a previous RAID0 attempt constantly losing some data (the other one was fine).

3 other people in the office are running SSDs (also 160GB Intel) since the end of 2009. OSes include MacOS X, Ubuntu and Windows XP and now 7.

All work fine so far and I'm not seeing any of the often quoted reliability issues (aside of that one that was defective from day 0 which happens with hard drives too)

And before you ask about the safety of using a RAID0: No I don't have backups but also, no, I don't need backups as all the important files are in git and all of my profile is on Dropbox.

Also had no problems whatsoever with my Intel X-25M, over 1.5 years old now. I've heard a lot of horror stories about other manufacturers, but never met another Intel user who had problems. Supposedly OCZ has gotten much better quality wise, though there are lots of bad reviews for those drives on newegg.

Two X25-Ms over the past two years and neither have failed. But I've been very conservative about which drive I chose due to the possibility. At the moment, Intel makes the only drives with a track record of reliability.

I had been under the impression that when SSD drives die, write operations start failing but existing data is still readable. Is this wrong?

No : Intel X25-M G2 160GB running Windows 7 since 2009-10-28.

Just had a failure last week on my OWC drive. Replacing it wasn't too bad (had to wait a week) but made me realize that with so much stuff in the cloud, the failure of laptop drives doesn't really bug me or slow me down.

Have had mine for just over 3 months, no problems whatsoever.

I had an 80GB X25-MG2 fail within the first week of use (by "fail" I mean a nearly complete irrecoverable loss of data--most probably related to a faulty controller rather than flash chips) . The replacement I got had been chugging along perfectly for a couple of years. I've never had any problems with a Vertex 2 120 drive that I also have.

Both drives had a pretty high read/write usage ratio, though. And most of the rewriting taking place was small in volume. I ordered a Vertex 3 drive last week, and I intend to sync its contents with a magnetic drive in the same system a few times a day, just like I have been doing with the other two drives. So all in all, besides the first Intel drive being a fluke, my experience was quite positive.

One intel X25-M 80GB SSD. According to the SMART information 10% of its write life has been used over 1.5 years. Still going strong in a work machine used day to day.

Two OCZ Vertex 2E's 120GB (separate machines). Had both for 6 months and both are working reliably with no signs of problems or performance degradation.

Not had a single failure so far.

I have never had one fail once it started in production, but have had two X-25M G2 160G drives fail out of the box (one would not respond at all and the other would not recognize more than 8G of available storage.) The higher-than-expected failure rate is annoying, but I would rather have them fail at install/setup time rather than six months later...

I've got a relatively new Vertex 2 which is totally fine, but that's still well within the realm of normalcy. However, I've also got a first gen x25-m, and that is fairly old as far as SSDs go. That one also still works perfectly.

The pull together a slightly larger sample size, consider the reviews of one model of OCZ Vertex 2, widely recognized is a solid SSD, in terms of price, performance, and durability:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227...

Of the 425 ratings, 17% are 1-star ratings, based almost entirely on a short-term failure measured in < 6 months. That's not to say the Vertex 2 as a whole has a failure rate that high (this is the vocal minority, after all), but it should at least help put some of the nay-sayers in perspective.

I posted this on the reddit thread as well, but I've used some SSDs in VM hosts, and seen a pretty damn high failure rate. They're great for VM hosts for obvious reasons, but they thrash pretty hard, and I've taken to triple RAID mirroring them, across different brands.

I have a Corsair P128 I bought in October of 2009. It cost me $350 but after seeing the performance gains and reading about the almost change in lifestyle you get in using one I thought it would be worth it.

I was right. Everyone was right. It's still running now, without issue, and I enjoy 8 second boot times with Windows 7 and virtually instantaneous-launch applications. Well worth the price. I regularly backup my data but it's nice to know that if it failed today I could buy a replacement from NewEgg for nearly half the price and probably better performance.

I've had an Intel X-25M die after about 16 months. BIOS wouldn't recognize it anymore.

I've had 2 (n-2 gen) OCZ Vertex SSDs die within days of installing, and 3 Intel X25M-80s that have been rock solid for 6-10 months.

There's nothing like seeing 6 kvm virtual machines boot up in seconds to remind you that they're damn fast on reads.

I have a 3.5" OCZ Vertex2 that's being used on a daily basis (with lots of swapping) since Oktober. No problems as of yet.

I've had another one (2.5") in my Macbook since early january. No problems either.

Performance might have degraded, but not that I've noticed.

I had a Super Talent (UltraDrive GX) fail after 2 days and 2 different OCZ Vertex 2 fail each after about 3 months. All of them failed in my trusty MacBook Pro.

I'm now back to good old hard drives, sure it's WAY slower but the current state of SSDs seemed to be a bit too unreliable.

In late 2009 I bought 2 Crucial SSDs for my MacBook Pro, replacing a Seagate HDD that had died after just 5 months (the other one went in the optical bay). They're still working fine after 16+ months, and even if they die now they'll have outlived many of my harddrives (75GXP anyone?).

One is my boot drive, and one is my media drive. SMART reports the boot drive has 78% of its erases left, and the media drive 100% (mostly static data). ~20% erases down after 16 months means if the wear leveling works out, my drive should last another 5 years.

My usage is quite normal - coding work doesn't do very many heavy writes. I have 8 GB RAM, so the swap file doesn't see much usage, but instead there's 8 GB of hibernate file writes whenever I put my laptop to sleep (a couple times a day). Also, there's some background process that hits the drive with ~100 KB of writes every couple of seconds.

I actually had something like 12 SSD failures in the same machine in about 18 months, including 3 of those being an OCZ Vertex 2 and one Intel X25-M. Failures ranged from working fine to completely failing and not even being recognized the next minute (!), to sudden very very slow read/write and drive errors leading to complete failure. Eventually I talked an Apple genius into replacing the logic board in the cursed MBP (second gen unibody, 15", replaced the hard drive instead of opting for the optical bay) and it's been running smooth with a newer Intel X25-M for 4 months now with similar usage patterns.

The first few failures I wanted to chalk up to SSDs being flaky or my being sent refurb drives, but given that I had so many in the same machine and no problems in any other desktops and laptops I tested SSDs with, I just want to blame the machine.

I bought a 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300 and put it in my MacBook Pro. It failed catastrophically within about a month. Luckily I do an automated full-disk backup to an external drive every night; between that and CrashPlan, I didn't lose any data, and Amazon gave me a full refund on the drive.

I then bought a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro and put it in the same MBP. It's been running fine for about eight months now.

Less than a year, no problem.