For those SAC rigs with Intel SSD's...

[Donnie Frank]

SAC-heads;

Between me and my GF we have purchased a total of 6 Intel SSD's of varying densities. Of the 6, 4 have failed - 2 within 2 weeks of installation and the other 2 within 90 days of installation. 3 of the 4 were replaced under warranty. Due to the 4th being an OEM disk, Intel would not replace it (lesson learned). The remaining 2 disks (both X25v 40GB) are in my SAC rig...<:^0 Not in a RAID volume, but one is an image of the other. All SSD's were purchased used via eBay.

Today - a mere 2 months post-installation - one of the warranty replacement SSD's died:

http://drummerdonnie.com/temp/SSD_Failure/2012-9-5_Failure_80GB.JPG

http://drummerdonnie.com/temp/SSD_Failure/2012-9-5_Failure_80GB_SMART.JPG

This drive is roughly 2 months old. Looks like I'll be contacting Intel AGAIN.

Buyers beware!

[Jeff Scott]

I thought SSID's were our salvation as far as hard drive failure's go. Is this normal? Or is it just the Intel SSID's

[hkmorgan87]

Must just be intel. Im using 2 corsair 40gb drives and they very stable and have been for nearly 2 years.

[TomyN]

Hi,

are you running XP?

XP and SSDs might cause some problems and there is a lot of information about it on the net.

Tomy

[RandyHyde]

Hi,

are you running XP?

XP and SSDs might cause some problems and there is a lot of information about it on the net.

Tomy

I've been using a 40GB Intel drive for almost two years now. On XP. No special TRIM drivers or anything like that. Not a problem.

OTOH, other than saving mix files (small) and the occasional SAC upgrade, I don't write to the drive very often (don't know if VM paging is active much).
cheers,
Randy Hyde

[Mattseymour]

Given how little RAM SAC needs, and windows itself uses when all the unnecessary services are disabled, having 3.5GB available means you can switch off the swapfile and then (hopefully) you're rarely writing anything.

[Wink0r]

I did a search and some reading on Tom's Hardware articles and the indications that I saw were that Intel SSDs were among the most reliable. Overall there seems to be a slight reliability advantage to SSDs but the history is not there yet because they have not been in use long and the numbers are still small. The major advantages to SSDs are speed (particularly for random reads) and power consumption.

[Donnie Frank]

Hi,

are you running XP?

XP and SSDs might cause some problems and there is a lot of information about it on the net.

Tomy

Ironically, I'm running XP on my SAC machine (which has seen no SSD failures) and Win 7 64-bit on all remaining machines.

[Donnie Frank]

I've been using a 40GB Intel drive for almost two years now. On XP. No special TRIM drivers or anything like that. Not a problem.

OTOH, other than saving mix files (small) and the occasional SAC upgrade, I don't write to the drive very often (don't know if VM paging is active much).
cheers,
Randy Hyde

Like you, my SAC machine also dons the 40GB Intel drives, which have seen no failures so far <knock on wood>. Maybe we're both lucky and the 40GB models don't suffer the same reliability issues as models with greater densities.

[Donnie Frank]

I did a search and some reading on Tom's Hardware articles and the indications that I saw were that Intel SSDs were among the most reliable. Overall there seems to be a slight reliability advantage to SSDs but the history is not there yet because they have not been in use long and the numbers are still small. The major advantages to SSDs are speed (particularly for random reads) and power consumption.

I did the same research and this is partially why I chose the Intel SSD's. Supposedly they're VERY reliable, but I just haven't seen it. Hard to think that I'm an isolated case. In addition to user review reliability, their return policy is pretty liberal (no receipts required, etc.). But, as you stated, they really haven't been out long enough to prove themselves in real-world applications.

Because of the liberal return policy and the fact that I'm obviously already committed to them I'll continue to use them. I can tell you this; I have become very anal regarding backups. I routinely do incremental backups every 3rd or 4th shutdown. This paradigm has really saved my butt.

For now - when an SSD dies - I'm simply populating spinning drives with the image file while I wait for the warranty return. The performance hit is mind-blowing. Funny how quickly I get used to webpages opening almost instantly, browsing being lighting fast and bootups in roughly a minute.

I thought about having a spare SSD drive, but then it would be sitting around burning up warranty time. I have 3 machines I regularly work on (4 counting my SAC rig) that are mostly redundant, so it's not a huge deal when I have to use another machine. But I'm honestly worried that my SAC rig will die in the middle of a show. It's encouraging to know that Randy's system has been reliable with the 40GB, which is what I have. I've got the redundant backup SSD, but it's obviously only as current as the most-recent clone of the main SSD.

I avoided RAID because of the lack of TRIM support. With swapping disabled, the only writing that would be done to the SSD would be mix sessions, which would probably negate the need for TRIM. Hopefully Intel will get it together and TRIM will support RAID volumes, in which case I would immediately set up my SAC rig with RAID mirroring.

I can't believe my failure rate is so high - this on 4 different machines all running Win 7 64-bit. I seem to be the only person on the planet seeing this kind of failure rate.

[Sound Machine Inc]

I only use OCZ Agility series or higher.. 9 pc's (3 sac rigs) with no failures in 2 years.. one PC for my laser engraving business has a 120g OCZ vertex and has been on 24/7 for 11 months with no issues at all :) I never liked the Intels... too many people saying they fail even though the "experts" say they are great

[gdougherty]

And the Sandforce based drives had numerous problems on machines that would go into low power modes and blue screen on wake-up. That would include the Agility and Vertex series 2-3 but on a machine with all power saving disabled it's less of a problem.

SSD's are theoretically more reliable due to the lack of moving parts, but it's still a piece of electronics with current passing through. Eliminating a swap file and minimizing writes will provide your best theoretical longevity. Having a higher capacity than you need also allows for more space used by the wear leveling feature.

[Wink0r]

Eliminating a swap file and minimizing writes will provide your best theoretical longevity.

According to the information I saw last night you only have about 18 years before you wear the drive out with write cycles with the newer 25nm memory cells.

[muzicman0]

And the Sandforce based drives had numerous problems on machines that would go into low power modes and blue screen on wake-up. That would include the Agility and Vertex series 2-3 but on a machine with all power saving disabled it's less of a problem.

But, at least OCZ, has upgraded firmware that has fixed that issue.

Also, the OCZ Agility series has great GC (Garbage collection), so using them in a RAID 1 array is perfectly acceptable, even though TRIM is not supported. I'm using dual 120GB Agility 3's in my SAC machine.

[Craig Allen]

You might want to reconsider buying them on ebay. You could be getting gray market drives.

[gdougherty]

You might want to reconsider buying them on ebay. You could be getting gray market drives.

+1

At that kind of failure rate, nobody would be buying Intel drives.

[Donnie Frank]

You might want to reconsider buying them on ebay. You could be getting gray market drives.

Intel warranties them by serial number, PBA number and LBA number. You then have to send the drive to Intel before before they send a new one. If it were gray market, either the numbers would be wrong or Intel would certainly know it upon physical inspection.

[Donnie Frank]

+1

At that kind of failure rate, nobody would be buying Intel drives.

My concern is this last failure, which is of a factory-fresh, brand-spanking-new drive. I thought I had made it "out of the woods" with all the warranty replacements. Now I'm thinking maybe not....<:^/

[Craig Allen]

Intel warranties them by serial number, PBA number and LBA number. You then have to send the drive to Intel before before they send a new one. If it were gray market, either the numbers would be wrong or Intel would certainly know it upon physical inspection.

Intel is a big company. Just because they want all the numbers doesn't mean they actually know or care how they originally got to market. If it were me, I'd try one from Newegg to see if it fails.

[Donnie Frank]

Intel is a big company. Just because they want all the numbers doesn't mean they actually know or care how they originally got to market. If it were me, I'd try one from Newegg to see if it fails.

I can do you one better. This last failed drive came directly from Intel as a warranty drive. It is < 90 days old. This is why I'm really concerned. Time will tell. I presently have 5 Intel SSD's in service with a 6th on my girlfriend's computer. We do VERY regular backups, so we haven't taken any data hits. But failure of the SSD during a show would be bad. I have the backup right there, but all mix data would be lost. I would have to reboot and would lose the present mix session. I suppose a work-around would be to copy-n-paste my mix sessions to my spinning drive every few minutes, but what an annoyance that would be. A RAID-1 volume is the real solution here. It would behoove me to set this up. The more I think about it, the more I think I will. Screw the TRIM support. Intel says the work-around is to image the array, wipe it clean (set to all zeros) and re-image the array. The more I think about it, the more I want to do this.

[Donnie Frank]

Update...

Finally...after 3 days I was able to connect with someone at Intel via their Chat services (which are often off-line). After chatting with the rep it seems this drive was replaced in early August - a mere 5 weeks ago. Needless to say I wasn't happy. Fortunately I do very regular backups, so no data was lost.

Intel normally offers 2 replacement options:

1) Send your drive at your expense and they ship a new one.
2) For $25.00 they'll advance you a drive and shipping materials to return your broken drive.

I told the guy, "I want option 2 and I want Intel to wave the $25.00 fee." I explained that I had already paid to ship a drive to them a mere 5 weeks ago and didn't feel I should have to pay again so quickly. The customer rep said, "Give me about an hour with this. I will call you." I gave him my number. About an hour and 15 minutes later my phone rang. It was the Intel rep who informed me that Intel would overnight a new drive at their expense along with return shipping materials. I did have to provide them with a CC number for a deposit.

Their SSD's may be failing like gang-busters around here, but at least Intel's service is good.

[Donnie Frank]

Interesting development...

I received my new SSD yesterday and it's a 320 series. My first failing SSD (August 6th) was an X25m, which was replaced with an exact duplicate, which then failed again last week. I wonder if Intel is giving up on the X25m series.

Initial research netted very high reliability ratings for the Intel SSD, and all SSD's in general. Now, a year later, it looks like failure stories are finally coming out of the wood work.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

Funny...the editorial comments the author makes regarding "I don't care if they fail every 12 months...." is right on par with how I feel. As long as Intel keeps sending me new SSD's, I just do regular backup every shut down and toss the spinner in there while I wait for the new SSD to arrive. Like he said, " it'd be like going back to dial-up internet (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/do-modems-still-matter.html) or 13" CRTs or single button mice."