Why is the IT industry so cautious about SSD reliability?
We have spent decades developing HDD fault-tolerance mechanisms or processes such as RAID and backups. We should trust them.
As SSDs are maturing it looks like there are two distinct markets where hard-disks can't go:
1) In servers, vendors offer cards that tie directly into the PCIe bus, bypassing SATA (
2) For laptops, one can look at the Macbook Air and it's SSD chips. Right now they are connected via SATA, but if that becomes a limiting factor, I see how that would be bypassed as well.
For now HDs and SSDs are very similar, but SSDs (which are essentially flash memory) can and will go where HDs cannot. They are quite different.
With SSD you have a chance of going completely blank. If it happens to be a firmware issue on a RAID mirror, there's also a chance of common fault in both drives. Even if you have backups in that case, do you really want to deal with such situation?
According to Google, about two thirds of the time, SMART will warn you.
> there's also a chance of common fault in both drives.
Never, ever trust a RAID array made from identical disks. Whenever possible use different manufacturers, different models and different batches. Whatever caused failure of one drive will eventually cause the failure of its twins. If all twins are in the same array, you won't be happy.