Comments on: Samsung defends flash reliability in solid-state drives

Company addresses questions about solid-state drive reliability and discusses the burgeoning market for the devices in enterprise servers.

[ice82]

It's good to hear that the SSD capacity will go up to 250GB soon.
I'll hold onto my laptop until next year for that 100GB+ SSD.

[Seaspray0]

So what is the typical write pattern for one of these drives being used instead of a standard platter hard drive? Many of the files get stored for long term without change and those areas would only receive limited writes compared to unallocated space. As the drive space is consumed to near capacity this would become a more critical issue. What then? Under those conditions, what would the expected lifetime of the flash hard drive be? Would a combination of the two be better? i.e. One platter drive for the OS (where read/write catching of virtual memory is highly active) and one flash drive for data storage.

[zag2]

I've had a Samsung 32gb SSD in my home theater computer for 6 months now, absolutely no trouble with reliability and the speed increase is massi ve. It boots in 20 seconds and launching applications is instant. Its actually very frustrating going back to a computer with a normal hard disk and waiting 1-2 seconds for apps like firefox and IE to load.

These things will revolutionize the server market if they are indeed more reliable than standard hard disks.

[nvmexpert]

What made you buy a SSD for a home theatre computer? It's funny that you think 1-2 seconds is frustrating :-)

[nvmexpert]

"He added that if a failure ever does occur, it will not occur in the flash chip itself but in the controller"

Are you saying that Samsung SSD's have a controller issue? How long does it take for them to fail???

[zag2]

I would expect its exactly the same probability of a HDD controller failing, Just without the risk of the mechanical parts wearing out.

[kokenge]

In Oct, 2007 i purchased 10 Dell D830 laptop for my company with the 64GB ssd. Two issues:
1) while their ramdom access speeds are indeed awesome, their sustained read/writes are pathetic. They will boot quickly, but try to open a simple 30 MB ppt, and you are waiting a while.

2) after 1.5 years, I am replacing all of them. Their speeds seem to have deteriorated over time. Worn out perhpas?

I am in the process of striping 5 ssd together in a server to test that setup. It should solve the speed issues while gaining the benefit of quick ramdom access.