Failure Rates of Solid State Drives

It's in French but this article has an interesting list of failure rates of SSDs (Solid State Drives). The translated version is here.

SSD's are really too young to really get a sense of their reliability in the long term but at least this is a start.

For the 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"

There is more info at the site.

HHD vs SSD

I've been asked more than a few times on what I think about HDD (spinning mechanical hard drives) vs SSD (solid state drives).

I've noticed a difference between the two during heaving editing. Dropped frames, longer seek times etc...but my experience is pretty limited, too limited to form a complete opinion yet. I did however run across this nice introductory article on the differences and limitations of SSDs compared to HHDs.

The two points that really caught my eye are:

As a primer for the following, we mention two major issues with SSDs:

1) HDDs can be put into storage for a decade and then, provided that there are still systems out there that support the interface, they can be plugged in and the data will be readily accessible. NAND flash-based SSDs will lose their data over time, even if they are powered down and in storage.

2) HDDs will show some degradation of performance over time, primarily relating to filling up of the outer diameter tracks and fragmentation of the drives’ media but a defragmentation will restore the performance since it is defined by spindle speed and media area density and those parameters never change. SSDs will show some initial extreme performance but degrade rapidly after heavy usage.