The Evils of Solid State Disks

You’d think that a solid state disk would be more reliable than one which contains tiny moving parts that whizz around in close proximity to each other, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. And with solid state disks you don’t get any warning.

With hard disks I’m quite good at detecting when something is amiss. Files that take a long time to arrive, clicking noises from the box, all give warning of bad stuff to come. But with an SSD they can just fail. And not just one track or sector, but the whole thing at once. At least my SSD went a bit wobbly before it finally expired. It worked fine when cold, and failed when it had warmed up. The good news is that ebuyer sent me direct replacement of the broken disk. The bad news is that the replacement is way too identical to the original. It doesn’t work either. And the ebuyer system seems to come unstuck if you try to return a return.

Ho hum.

Comments

[Jamie]

I think the trade off of the speed (and having backups) means that an SSD is still worth it, even if they do die. Getting running again is a minor inconvenience compared to the advantages they give.

[Rob]

I agree. Every now and then I go back to a machine with a magnetic disk drive and the difference in performance is very noticeable. And all my important stuff is on Skydrive anyway, so I'm not going to be worrying about losing data.