[Mr Alpha]

The folks over at behardware.com have access to the return database for a large french etailer. I would assume this is the same etailer as the number I previously posted about came from.

Preliminarily:

The returns rates given here concern the products sold between April 1st and October 1st 2011 for returns made before April 2012, namely after between 6 months and a year of use.

So this is early failures. In other words unlikely to contain any SSDs that were worn out.

The numbers are also compared to the previous article they did in October 2011.

So, the numbers. Return rates for hard drive manufacturers:

- Samsung 1.23% (as against 1.5%)
- Western 1.63% (as against 2.0%)
- Seagate 1.89% (as against 1.8%)
- Hitachi 3.95% (as against 3.0%)

Western Digital has crept up above Seagate. All of them are pretty much the same except Hitachi, which is quite a bit behind the others.

The worst performing models:

- 9.70% Seagate Barracuda XT 3 TB
- 8.94% Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 1.5 TB
- 7.53% Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB
- 7.30% Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 2 TB
- 5.78% Western Digital RE4-GP 2 TB
- 5.33% Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB

As always with hard drives: bigger is less reliable.

Now for the good stuff, SSD failure rates:

- Crucial 0.82% (as against 0.8%)
- Intel 1.73% (as against 0.1%)
- Corsair 2.93% (as against 2.9%)
- OCZ 7.03% (as against 4.2%)

Not only is OCZ worst as always, they seem to be getting worse. Intel has also lost their first place with a 10x increase in return rates. Intel launched the 320 in March 2011, and the firmware fix for the 8MB bug was released in August, so the data covers just the period in which the 320 was sold with the 8MB bug, which is the likely explanation for Intel's numbers.

The worst performing SSD models:

- 15.58% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 240 GB
- 13.28% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 160 GB
- 11.76% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 80 GB
- 9.52% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 120 GB
- 8.57% OCZ Vertex 3 Series 120 GB
- 7.49% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 60 GB
- 6.61% OCZ Vertex 2 Series 3.5" SSD 120 GB
- 6.37% OCZ Vertex 3 Series 240 GB
- 6.37% OCZ Agility 3 60 GB
- 5.89% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 100 GB

Hmm, there seems to be a pattern of some sort here. Can't quite put my finger on it though.


Go read the entire thing. There are a lot more numbers there, for a lot more hardware than just storage.

[EarthDog]

Excellent information Mr. A!

Im wondering is the OCZ drives, post FW fix, failure rates will drop. I recall the FW fix coming out early this year... after these datasets were taken

Crucial FTW.