Intel, Samsung comment on flash, SSD reliability

In a recent interview, an Intel manager in the NAND products group discussed the "physical limitations" of flash data recording and the challenges of making solid state drives (SSDs) more reliable. Samsung also addressed SSD durability.

Toshiba 128GB SSD

(Credit: Toshiba)

The comments from Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, are particularly pertinent after a report was released Monday by Avi Cohen, head of research at Avian Securities, stating that the "return rates of current SLC based SSDs at Dell are running 20 percent to 30 percent due to a combination of performance issues and failures."

Cohen said this compares unfavorably with hard disk drives. "Currently failure rates for SSDs are running a full order of magnitude higher than that of disk drives (10 percent to 12 percent vs. 1 percent to 2 percent) and these issues only get magnified" in the move to next-generation technology referred to as "Multi-Level Cell," or MLC.

Update: Dell has refuted this report and called it "unfounded and wholly inaccurate."

Though Winslow didn't address failure statistics specifically, he did speak generally about inherent flash limitations. "There are physical limitations to flash (SSD) cycling. Just like a hard disk drive will eventually wear out," he said. "Cycling" implies writing data to the SSD. "NAND flash cycled to certain number of times will eventually start failing," he said.

Winslow said the challenge for Intel is to make drives reliable despite this. "The ability to manage those failures and ensure that no data ever gets lost and...does not affect the operation of the unit. That's the challenge," he said. "Reliability will be a key differentiation point among the solid state drive vendors." He added that Intel intends to excel in this area.

As reported earlier, Intel is expected to make an announcement in the near future about its entry into the high-capacity SSD market with drives ranging from 80GB to 160GB.

Samsung has also addressed the reliability issue. Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, said a flash device that is rated at 100,000 write cycles can write 100,000 times "to every single (memory) cell within the device." In other words, the device doesn't write to the same cell over and over again but spreads out the writes over many different cells. He said when failures do occur, they typically occur in the controller silicon, not in the flash device itself.

Notebook PC makers are increasingly adopting SSDs in popular notebooks such as the MacBook Air and the ThinkPad X300. Toshiba's new Dynabook SS RX series was announced Monday with a 128GB SSD option. Typically, notebooks to date have come with 64GB SSDs. (Toshiba announcement here).

[kai6novice]

If SSD has that problem. Doesn't that mean our thumb drive, SD card, CompactFlash card ... etc all have the same problem? Why don't OS be smart enough to manage our usage of SSD. So that our PC would have both HD and SSD. And our OS will determine if data should store in HD or SSD. And keep track of how many time a cell has been written. And spread the write cycle among the cells. And maximum the life of a SSD. I think software should be smart enough to do that...

[htcstech]

Development will sort the issues out eventually.
What is interesting is that CF2* and CF4 cards can now be used for paging/virtual memory/swap files with the right controller card. These are relatively cheap and in operation reduces wear on the HD and makes the machine faster (around 32mb/s).

*Compact Flash

[hellsyes]

kai6novice,

Did you read the article? The flash controllers already do wear-leveling. They are saying that most of the failures are in the CONTROLLER SILICON. At least thats what the guy from Samsung is claiming.

[brando20002003]

i think that cpu are tapped out you need a realy fast hard drive to keep up with the super fast cpu. intel know this but this is a must have. image how fast you can scan one of these ssd. the 100,000 cycle time seems to be not replace standed hard drive but i would keep a close eye these hard drives. sure there are problems there alway problems but i'm sure someone well work it out.

[Magallanes]

So, it is not smart to jump over ssd, not for a while cause :ssd it's expensive, unstable (no matter who is the guilty) and limited in size.