New Intel SSD's

Lol you have a great point there. I remember the packaging on my last SSD said rugged + reliable. I was thinking rugged? In what way it is not as if I use my laptop while encountering high G or throw it around. Pretty stupid word to describe it lol considering the rest of the laptop would be trash if you treated it ruggedly.

 

Which manufacturer are you talking about exactly? Are you trolling? I tried my best but cannot find any manufacturer with non-negligible market share which provides less than 3 years.

Intel (which this thread is about) gives 3 years. Samsung, Kingston, OCZ, A-Data, Crucial, and WD give 3 years. Patriot gives 5 years (Crucial, too, on select models).

 

Intel does give 3 years, that's correct. It might have changed, but atleast initially many manufacturer's were giving just a 1 year warranty.
I'm a very honest and straightfoward person, I speak my mind (which sometimes has gotten me into trouble). Being a long time member, and having quite a few posts under my belt, I'd like to think I have better things to do than troll on forums. I'm a bit more mature than that. Just something to think about.

 

I'll have to find some supporting documentation, but I'm pretty sure the guy with the electrical engineering degree knows a bit about this stuff .

Bottom line is that 25nm is cheaper because for the same amount of silicon your capacity increases. But it is also less reliable because it has to operate at lower voltages and/or each cell of the memory cannot hold as many electrons as the previous technology. Combine that with the fact that smaller process technologies have higher leakage rates, and you get this not-so-good combination of trouble.

I will freely admit that Intel has done a lot to ensure their more recent firmware releases are correct and functional, but at the same time they have had problems before (and they're migrating to a new process and/or a new controller).

Warranty lengths are particularly troublesome. OCZ was busted recently (check their own forum for documentation) and was caught red handed using flash chips that could only withstand 5000 writes (instead of the 10000 write chips they used previously). Their product lines now use both chips and what they put in is what they get at the best price when they're manufacturing your drive.

OCZ's position? Suck it up. Not exactly consumer friendly.

 

Honestly, I am surprised to be in the minority here as someone defending the reliability of SSDs.

Let me sum up my thoughts:
- Compared to HDDs, SSDs have an extremely low risk of mechanical failure due to a lack of moving parts.
- In difference to hard drives, they are able to withstand stark shocks. Not every consumer has an enterprise-class laptop with a free fall sensor that stops a drive from spinning. An SSD is waaay more likely to survive a drop.
- The status quo is that virtually every SSD on the market today provides consumers with at least 3 years warranty. Personally, I use non-volatile storage device for a time of 3-4 years and then replace them. So the warranty is pretty much for the bulk of the lifetime in my case.
- The biggie: SSDs are much less likely than HDDs to fail when writing or erasing data. In contrast to that, a hard drive will typically fail during a write operation, sometimes leading to irrecoverable data loss.
- Ofc, SSDs will fail. But so do mechanical hard drives (iirc, the typical mechanical drive in a storage array is replaced once every year or so). You need to make backups whatever you use but I don't see the compelling reason ITT to be particular pessimistic about SSDs.

 

OCZ - 2 year warranty.
PQI - 2 year warranty.
Wintec - 2 year warranty.
Transcend - 2 year warranty.
Kingston - no mention of warranty, but lists 500,000 hours MTBF, while others say 1 million + hours.
Another Wintec, 2 year warranty.
RiData - 2 year warranty.
Transcend - 2 years.
Another WinTec - 2 years.
Transcend - 2 years.
WinTec - 2 years.
Kingston - 500,000 hours MTBF.
Patriot - 2 years.
RiData - 2 years.
Transcend - 2 years.
WinTec - 2 years (starting to see a scary trend with these).
RiData - 2 years.
Patriot - 2 years.
Dane Elec - 2 years.
WinTec - 2 years.
Corsair - 2 years - $699

Of the 169 2.5" SSDs I looked at, those above have just 2 year warranties. I was impressed to see so many that offer 3 year warranties now, and a handfull that offer 5 years (the vast majority of those were Crucial).
So things have definitely improved, it's clear that the manufacturers are more confident in their products than even not long ago.
Still I find it interesting that the vast majority of traditional hard drives offer 5 year warranties. It's a nice trend though to see that manufacturers seem to be backing their SSDs more. It's also very clear that they weren't so confident in them at first, offering just 1 or 2 year warranties.
Regardless it was interesting to look through them all. Those WinTecs worry me though, I'd stay away from them. ALL their WinTecs have just 2 year warranties.
Do I think warranty is indicative of reliability? No, I just think that manufacturers have more confidence in them, but also they probably wanted to save a bit of face considering Intel offers 3 year warranties on them all. What I mean to say is, when your biggest competitor not only forces you to lower your own prices because of their low prices, but they offer 3 year warranties to boot, you're kind of forced to offer the same because you don't want others to flock to them and not buy your product. Just some food for thought.

 

talin,

great work! this should be a useful reference. you list 21 specific drives with 2 year warranty. is it fair for me to infer from the above that only 21 out of 169 drives offer 2 year warranty, while the rest is 3 years+?

edit: whatever the correct answer is, i agree with the next to the corsair p256 (all other drives in that list of 21 items are somewhat esoteric choices and not comparable to top sellers such as the intel drives).

 

A few only listed the rated hours MTBF but no warranty. The ones with 500,000 MTBF and listed no warranty I posted in my list.

 

Wait, OCZ is using substandard MLC flash? What?

 

It's an interesting discussion.

I would not assume though that shorter warranty means that the product is less reliable.

Now it may mean that, but it could also mean something completely different. For example: It seems like a few manufacturers have just extended warranty to three years because the others were doing it too.

Maybe a discussion based on MTBF would be more accurate, but then again no one knows if these ratings really hold true.

 

well mate , no offense but the moral of your story is not to buy Supertalent SSD's.. i'm quite sure with an intel you'd love it