[pmden]

"We had one SSD fail in this way and then come back when it was pulled out and reinserted, apparently perfectly healthy, which doesn't inspire confidence."

We've experienced exactly the same thing. Our general course of action is to perform a hard power cycle of the server through IPMI - a warm cycle doesn't seem to work. I've always presumed it was down to dodgy SSD controller firmware given the way it suddenly stops appearing in the output of fdisk -l.

[phaedrus]

I have three SSDs in three different laptops/desktops. In their current host machines they've been working flawlessly for a couple of years. Prior to my figuring out which SSD paired best with which host machine, I experienced intermittent strange and catastrophic problems (unreadable sectors to complete data loss) with each one. These were different brands, different capacities, bought in different years.

It's sort of a devil's bargain - the performance of SSDs is so much better that I can't pass up using it over a spinning disk even if they occasionally lose everything. There was a great game for the original Nintendo called "Pinball Quest". As you advanced through the game you could get upgrades such as side stoppers, stronger flippers, etc. You bought these items from a demon in between levels. After the red "Strong Flippers", the next upgrade was the purple "Devil's Flippers". The trick was that occasionally they'd turn to stone when you needed them and possibly cause you to lose the pinball. But they were such an upgrade over the Strong Flippers (when they weren't turned to stone) that you bought them anyway.

SSDs are kind of like that.

[jug]

It also doesn’t help that at least Windows 10 is seemingly now ”Optimized for SSD” in the sense that performance is quite terrible on a traditional HDD. I imagine this will become more and more common as seek times and hard drive thrashing becomes practically invisible to users as well as developers. It will just get harder to go back as time goes on.

[jplayer01]

I just don't keep anything important on my SSD. My desktop's SSD is for Windows and games. All documents and other stuff goes on my mechanical drives and my AppData folder is backed up every night too. Everything on my laptop's SSD is either in cloud storage or in an external git repo. I'm 100% prepared for the certain eventuality of any of these SSDs going tits up unexpectedly and catastrophically.

I'm more worried about everybody else who gets an SSD and doesn't take the right precautions, because everybody sells SSDs as being so much more reliable than mechanical drives.

I worked as a PC technician for a while recently. Of the handful of catastrophic failures of mechanical drives we had, the majority of those were ones that were physically dropped, resulting in a head crash. Otherwise, we generally always managed to save data from failing drives. Any failing SSD we encountered was just dead, since there are really only two states: Fine or failed. There was nothing we could do except refer them to a data recovery company that charges thousands of Euros.