[dripton]

Funny, I suspect that SSDs have much higher real-world failure rates. (My personal, limited, anecdotal evidence is that my 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD lasted about a year as the root drive in a busy Linux desktop, while I have a stack of about a dozen hard drives that have been retired due to being too small or too slow while still working fine.)

Lack of moving parts is great, but flash allows a finite number of write cycles.

[chaud]

How heavily were you using the laptop? Did it fail from running out of write cycles or something else?

Some people over on xtremesystems have done Endurance testing, and the 64 GB m4 took over 700TB of writing to for failure to occur, and 172 TB to reduce the MWI to 0.

In a little over a year I have only written 4.1TB to my SSD in my desktop. Write cycles are very unlikely to run out for me before I replace the drive.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SS...

[dripton]

I don't have actual numbers, but it's my primary desktop at home, and it saw everyday use.

[cs702]

dripton: I hear you, but note that I'm not interested in write-cycle limits nor MTBF stats obtained in a lab setting; I'd just like to know the real-world rate of hardware failure of SSDs.

[UnoriginalGuy]

I think everyone would. Unfortunately there are financial reasons for SSD manufacturers to keep that information secret and contractual reasons why retailers cannot release it.

I think Intel released some information on the reliability of their SSDs a few years ago but that was likely because they knew they were doing best and their enterprise customers are very interested in that for their data-centre rollouts.

The very limited information I've seen suggests to me that a few years ago SSDs had a much higher failure rate than HDDs (double in the first 6 months) but that has been falling very quickly with each new generation of SSDs (and as the profit margin grows and manufacturers have to work on reputation to justify the markup).