SSD failure rates

Mr Alpha · 03-02-11, 03:59 AM

In my SSD research I stumbled over a french site that had gotten its hand on the the failure rate for different hardware according to a French etailer. Here are SSD failure rates according to brand:

Intel 0,59%
Corsair 2,17%
Crucial 2,25%
Kingston 2,39%
OCZ 2,93%

No surprises there. Intel is the clear leader and OCZ is worst. As a comparison here are the failure rates of some hard drives:
1TB drives:

5,76% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B
5,20% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C
3,68% : Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
3,37% : Samsung SpinPoint F1
2,51% : Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
2,37% : WD Caviar Green WD10EARS
2,10% : Seagate Barracuda LP
1,57% : Samsung SpinPoint F3
1,55% : WD Caviar Green WD10EADS
1,35% : WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS
1,24% : Maxtor DiamondMax 23

Full disclosure: I have a Hitach Deskstar 7k1000.B. Maybe I should be worried.
2TB drives:

9,71% : WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS
6,87% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000
4,83% : WD Caviar Green WD20EARS
4,35% : Seagate Barracuda LP
4,17% : Samsung EcoGreen F3
2,90% : WD Caviar Green WD20EADS

As an aside, turns out Steve Gibson is right. Failure rates seem to scale linearly with size.

EDIT: A quick Google translate gives this additional information. This is failure rates for the first year only, ie failures within a year of the sale. So it is only infant mortality rates and so does not include any wear-out-the-flash failures. Also, it only includes the drives that have been returned to the store, not drives RMA'ed directly to the manufacturer, which mean manufacturers with good customer RMA service probably have their failure rates underestimated.

King107s · 03-02-11, 07:06 AM

Awww crap....

I have two 1TB SeaGate Barracuda 7200.12 in RAID 0 my tower and two 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP in an external RAID 0.

Funny thing is people give seagates a bad rap but I have been running my 7200.12 for a long long time with zero issues. Also no issues with the LP's and I've been hammering them.

Also have a 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD which I bricked my self on a failed firmware upgrade and had to RMA, luckily OCZ's customer service is outstanding.

Marshmallow64 · 03-02-11, 10:47 AM

Wow, a 2 tb WD black has a 9.71% failure rate!!!??? That is huge, didin't think it would be so high. Thanks for the info!

EarthDog · 03-02-11, 10:52 AM

Nice find!!!! Paranoia (on SSD's), will destroy ya!

dropadrop · 03-02-11, 03:21 PM

The failure rates on the SSD's are towards the better end of 1TB mechanical disks, Intel is actually astounding!

What I mean is that these stats have been going around, and everybody concentrates on how good Intels reliability is (and it is amazing), and how bad the other SSD manufacturers are; but they are still doing pretty well comparing to mechanical disk manufacturers... And who has been in storage for what seems to be ages? The "other" SSD manufacturers are all "ram companies" who have probably been used to RMA's being ok, hopefully stats such as these will cause them to up their game.

IgnitedX · 03-02-11, 09:16 PM

interesting bit of information, thank you for that!

and yeah, nearly 10% failure rate in the first year is higher than I expect them to be... it's almost like gambling your data =| unless you raid or regularly back up of course

theELVISCERATOR · 03-02-11, 09:20 PM

Raptors are bulletproof.

dropadrop · 03-04-11, 09:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IgnitedX

interesting bit of information, thank you for that!

and yeah, nearly 10% failure rate in the first year is higher than I expect them to be... it's almost like gambling your data =| unless you raid or regularly back up of course

Raid is not a substitute for backups...

And since this is a tech site I would assume everybody with any important data does back it up, though maybe it does require being burnt once before you understand how important it can be.

I think disk failures are still quite a big hassle backups or not.

tool_462 · 03-05-11, 04:10 AM

Wish we could see the sample size

Mr Alpha · 03-05-11, 05:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tool_462

Wish we could see the sample size

Your not the only one. Would be nice to have some error bars on that. In the beginning of the article it mentions that statistics are only given for brands when there is more than 500 sold and for models when there is more than 100 sold. This does mean you can do some guesstimates. A bit of napkin math gives me (for a 95% confidence interval):

Intel (-0.0813%, 1.26%)
Corsair (0.893%, 3.45%)
Crucial (0.950%, 3.55%)
Kingston (1.05%, 3.73%)
OCZ (1.45%, 4.41%)

This is on the pessimistic assumption they all sold only 500. With the real data the error bars should probably be smaller.

tool_462 · 03-05-11, 06:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Alpha

Your not the only one. Would be nice to have some error bars on that. In the beginning of the article it mentions that statistics are only given for brands when there is more than 500 sold and for models when there is more than 100 sold. This does mean you can do some guesstimates. A bit of napkin math gives me (for a 95% confidence interval):

Intel (-0.0813%, 1.26%)
Corsair (0.893%, 3.45%)
Crucial (0.950%, 3.55%)
Kingston (1.05%, 3.73%)
OCZ (1.45%, 4.41%)

This is on the pessimistic assumption they all sold only 500. With the real data the error bars should probably be smaller.

Yeah I ran a quick calculation based on the same numbers.

I guess the time I spent in school and internship using statistics for homicide research with SPSS and Access has made me only interested in infallable numbers

Who would peer review a data set on hard drive failures?

Not that these aren't interesting numbers, just wish there was more behind it so we could assign higher relevance to the results.

madhatter256 · 03-14-11, 01:53 PM

I can agree with those numbers.

In my old job we had a good number of black 1TB and black 2TB prematurely die within the year, along with the WD green 2TB (EARS) model.

Omsion · 03-14-11, 08:18 PM

Really nice stuff here. It seems they're planning on running something like this every few months or so. Last one was in April 2010 (Pg 6 for HDs). They got themselves quite a nice source.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Alpha

Your not the only one. Would be nice to have some error bars on that. In the beginning of the article it mentions that statistics are only given for brands when there is more than 500 sold and for models when there is more than 100 sold. This does mean you can do some guesstimates. A bit of napkin math gives me (for a 95% confidence interval):

Intel (-0.0813%, 1.26%)
Corsair (0.893%, 3.45%)
Crucial (0.950%, 3.55%)
Kingston (1.05%, 3.73%)
OCZ (1.45%, 4.41%)

This is on the pessimistic assumption they all sold only 500. With the real data the error bars should probably be smaller.

Actually, I'd expect a more complete analysis to have larger error bars, due to clustering, since the data comes from only one store. For instance, the April article has one hard drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 Go) with an RMA rate of 39%. I'd be surprised if that's anywhere near the actual failure rate, and is rather an artifact of the restrictive sample cluster. Of course, we can't do a better analysis since we have no idea how clustered these observations are.

hank123 · 03-15-11, 12:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theELVISCERATOR

Raptors are bulletproof.

tell you have one go bad on you like i did. had bad sectors.

SMOKEU · 03-15-11, 04:35 AM

A mate of mine who manages a server room containing over US$1 million of servers said that consumer level drives tend to have too many reliability issues so they have 400GB server drives. Go figure.

dropadrop · 03-15-11, 06:33 AM

We've had less issues with SCSI and SAS drives on servers too, though these days it's pretty rare that anything apart from the OS and applications are located on the internal disks.

aphellyon · 03-15-11, 10:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hank123

tell you have one go bad on you like i did. had bad sectors.

Yea, I think one of my raptors is going now after a year and a half... getting occasional bsods and when i reboot i get intel matrix raid manager warnings on one of the drive. So far, I've been able to mark the drive as normal and keep my array going... but i doubt that will last.

YoshiMon · 03-15-11, 11:45 AM

If only Google had given up it's data on platter drive fail rates we would likely not even have to worry about the sample size.

Over_G · 03-15-11, 12:29 PM

<9% failure rate on a WD Caviar Black?
Good thing I put the OS on a Corsair F60 SSD.

King107s · 03-15-11, 01:37 PM

That does sound a little high.... all these numbers sound high to me.

03-02-11, 03:59 AM	Thread Starter #1
Mr Alpha Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2006	SSD failure rates In my SSD research I stumbled over a french site that had gotten its hand on the the failure rate for different hardware according to a French etailer. Here are SSD failure rates according to brand: Intel 0,59% Corsair 2,17% Crucial 2,25% Kingston 2,39% OCZ 2,93% No surprises there. Intel is the clear leader and OCZ is worst. As a comparison here are the failure rates of some hard drives: 1TB drives: 5,76% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B 5,20% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 3,68% : Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 3,37% : Samsung SpinPoint F1 2,51% : Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 2,37% : WD Caviar Green WD10EARS 2,10% : Seagate Barracuda LP 1,57% : Samsung SpinPoint F3 1,55% : WD Caviar Green WD10EADS 1,35% : WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1,24% : Maxtor DiamondMax 23 Full disclosure: I have a Hitach Deskstar 7k1000.B. Maybe I should be worried. 2TB drives: 9,71% : WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS 6,87% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 4,83% : WD Caviar Green WD20EARS 4,35% : Seagate Barracuda LP 4,17% : Samsung EcoGreen F3 2,90% : WD Caviar Green WD20EADS As an aside, turns out Steve Gibson is right. Failure rates seem to scale linearly with size. EDIT: A quick Google translate gives this additional information. This is failure rates for the first year only, ie failures within a year of the sale. So it is only infant mortality rates and so does not include any wear-out-the-flash failures. Also, it only includes the drives that have been returned to the store, not drives RMA'ed directly to the manufacturer, which mean manufacturers with good customer RMA service probably have their failure rates underestimated. Last edited by Mr Alpha; 03-02-11 at 07:25 AM.
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03-02-11, 07:06 AM	#2
King107s Member Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Florida	Awww crap.... I have two 1TB SeaGate Barracuda 7200.12 in RAID 0 my tower and two 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP in an external RAID 0. Funny thing is people give seagates a bad rap but I have been running my 7200.12 for a long long time with zero issues. Also no issues with the LP's and I've been hammering them. Also have a 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD which I bricked my self on a failed firmware upgrade and had to RMA, luckily OCZ's customer service is outstanding. __________________ CPU Intel Core i7-2600K @ 4.9 GHz on H2O MB ASRock Z77 Extreme9 RAM G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 2133 9-11-10-28 VC Sapphire Dual-X OC 7970 3GB 1050/1500 (3DMark11 P10551) SSD 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SATAIII HDD RAID0 2x1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 PSU Corsair AX1200 Case Corsair Obsidian 800D w/ Aerocool Shark Black ed. fans Cooling EK Supreme HF Rev 2 block, BIX GTX360 Rad, AFC1212D-PWM Fans, Primochill Myraid Res, Swiftech MCP655-B, Prolimatech PK-1 TIM, PrimoChill Liquid Utopia, PrimoFlex PRO LRT Tubing 1/2" ID 3/4" UV Blue
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03-02-11, 10:47 AM	#3
Marshmallow64 Member Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: California	Wow, a 2 tb WD black has a 9.71% failure rate!!!??? That is huge, didin't think it would be so high. Thanks for the info! __________________ :: Gaming Desktop :: CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T @ 3.9 Ghz 1.4v \| MOBO: MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 570 (732/1464/1900) \| RAM: 4 GB G-Skill DDR3 1600 SSD: OCZ Vertex 120 GB \| HD1: WD Black 640 GB \| HD2: WD Black 2 TB SC: Xfi Titanium Fatal1ty \| PSU: Corsair HX 620 W KB: Saitek Eclipse \| MOUSE: Logitech MX 518 CASE: Antec 1200 \| OS: Windows 7 x64 :: Laptop :: MOD: Macbook Pro 13” 2011 \| CPU: Intel Core i5 @ 2.3 Ghz RAM: 4 GB DDR3 1333 \| OS: OS X Lion 10.7.2
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03-02-11, 10:52 AM	#4
EarthDog Senior PITA Member Overclockers.com Editor Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Stuck in Maryland...	Nice find!!!! Paranoia (on SSD's), will destroy ya! __________________ Should I R0 my SSD? / SandyBridge / Ivybridge Overclocking Guide / AMD Overclocking Guide / Power Supply Guide SSD Reliability/Write Endurance / JOIN THE BENCHING TEAM! / Bulldozer Overclocking Guide / Forum Etiquette Want to see your writing featured on the overclockers.com Front Page? PM me, I can help! "We have more information and more ways of accessing it than ever, yet seem increasingly less inclined to do so."- Michael Wilbon
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03-02-11, 03:21 PM	#5
dropadrop Member Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Finland	The failure rates on the SSD's are towards the better end of 1TB mechanical disks, Intel is actually astounding! What I mean is that these stats have been going around, and everybody concentrates on how good Intels reliability is (and it is amazing), and how bad the other SSD manufacturers are; but they are still doing pretty well comparing to mechanical disk manufacturers... And who has been in storage for what seems to be ages? The "other" SSD manufacturers are all "ram companies" who have probably been used to RMA's being ok, hopefully stats such as these will cause them to up their game.
	QUOTE Thanks

SSD failure rates

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03-02-11, 09:16 PM	#6
IgnitedX Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: Vancouver, B.C.	interesting bit of information, thank you for that! and yeah, nearly 10% failure rate in the first year is higher than I expect them to be... it's almost like gambling your data =\| unless you raid or regularly back up of course __________________ ^{i7 2600K @ 0.0046 THz}_{ASUS P8P67 Pro B3}^{Antec Nine Hundred Two}_{XFX Radeon HD 6950}^{Intel 320 160 GB} G.SKILL F3-12800CL7D-8GBRH Ripjaws PC3-12800 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600 CL7-8-7-24 ^{Corsair H70}_{Antec TruePower Quattro 850W}^{WD150EARS 1.5 TB}_{some random DVD burner...} _~~~\|^••_•_~~~~\☹/~
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03-02-11, 09:20 PM	#7
theELVISCERATOR Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Michiana	Raptors are bulletproof. __________________ Intel 2600k @4.5ghz Megahalem/Corsair SP120 Pull Gskill Sniper 8gb DDR3-2133cas8 @ 1866 MSI P67A-GD65 BIOS 2.4 Galaxy Winforce GTX670 @1215/3404 SLI Xfi Fatality Pro Sound Boot /Adata SX900 256gb SSD Storage/ 2x 640GB WDAAK Raid 0 Antec 1200/Corsair 750 TX PSU / Win7 Pro 64bit Yamakasi 30" IPS 2560x1600
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03-05-11, 04:10 AM	#9
tool_462 Member Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Northern MN	Wish we could see the sample size __________________ i5 2500K @ 4.9GHz+ 8GB G-Skill RipJaws DDR3-2000 @1600Mhz CAS 6 Asus P8P67 Pro CrossFire 6970's @ 950/1450 Xeon X5677 @ 4.5Ghz 6GB G-Skill RipJaws DDR3-2000 @1600Mhz CAS 7 Gigabyte EX58-UD5 4870x2 i7-880 @ 4.2Ghz+ 4GB G-Skill RipJaws DDR3-2000 @2300Mhz CAS 9 Asus Maximus III Formula MSI Hawk 5770
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03-14-11, 01:53 PM	#12
madhatter256 Member Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: CFL	I can agree with those numbers. In my old job we had a good number of black 1TB and black 2TB prematurely die within the year, along with the WD green 2TB (EARS) model. __________________ Heatware
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03-15-11, 04:35 AM	#15
SMOKEU Member Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: NZ	A mate of mine who manages a server room containing over US$1 million of servers said that consumer level drives tend to have too many reliability issues so they have 400GB server drives. Go figure. __________________ MY RIG: i7 2600K with Thermalright Venomous X cooler Asus P8P67 Pro B3 GSkill Ripjaws 16GB (2X 8GB) 1866MHz CL10 Sapphire 6950 2GB 870/1350MHz @ 1.2V Corsair Force 3 120GB OWC Mercury Pro 60GB WD 2TB X2, 1.5TB, Seagate 500GB 24" Viewsonic LED 1080p Samsung 5.1 amp with 2 12" subs and a pair of 6X9s.
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03-15-11, 06:33 AM	#16
dropadrop Member Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Finland	We've had less issues with SCSI and SAS drives on servers too, though these days it's pretty rare that anything apart from the OS and applications are located on the internal disks.
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03-15-11, 11:45 AM	#18
YoshiMon Member Join Date: Dec 2008	If only Google had given up it's data on platter drive fail rates we would likely not even have to worry about the sample size. __________________ Personal Desktop: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, PC Chips A15G, 2x Wintec DDR2-800 2G, Powercolor 5670 512M, Intel 520 Series Cherryville SSD (120GB), 2x Seagate ST3500418AS (500G) RAID 0, Corsair CX430, Dual-headed Acer X183H/HP vs15, Win7, stock settings. Server/Office: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4450e, Gigabyte M61SME-S2, 2x Supertalent DDR2-667 1G, Onboard Geforce 6100, WD 2500JB (250G), Samsung Spinpoint F4EG (1.5TB), Corsair CX430, Sony KDL-32L5000, MSI TV@nywhere Plus, Win7, stock settings, running ORB. Tablet: Nokia n810, Maemo Diablo. Mobile: LG Optimus Elite Laptop: Emachine E443
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03-15-11, 12:29 PM	#19
Over_G Registered Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: United States	<9% failure rate on a WD Caviar Black? Good thing I put the OS on a Corsair F60 SSD. __________________ New rig AMD Phenom II X6 1090T @ 3.6 w/ CM Hyper 212+ stock fan Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H REV 2.1 Onboard ATI Radeon HD4290 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1333 Corsair F60 60GB SSD/ WD Caviar Black 1TB Antec Earthwatts 650W.
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03-15-11, 01:37 PM	#20
King107s Member Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Florida	That does sound a little high.... all these numbers sound high to me. __________________ CPU Intel Core i7-2600K @ 4.9 GHz on H2O MB ASRock Z77 Extreme9 RAM G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 2133 9-11-10-28 VC Sapphire Dual-X OC 7970 3GB 1050/1500 (3DMark11 P10551) SSD 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SATAIII HDD RAID0 2x1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 PSU Corsair AX1200 Case Corsair Obsidian 800D w/ Aerocool Shark Black ed. fans Cooling EK Supreme HF Rev 2 block, BIX GTX360 Rad, AFC1212D-PWM Fans, Primochill Myraid Res, Swiftech MCP655-B, Prolimatech PK-1 TIM, PrimoChill Liquid Utopia, PrimoFlex PRO LRT Tubing 1/2" ID 3/4" UV Blue
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