Most SSDs reviews focus their attention on speed and endurance (terabytes written) benchmarks.
However, searching a little bit more on the subject, I've found the following issues:
SSDs have very different failure modes from traditional magnetic hard drives. [...]
(for example, incomplete or failed writes due to sudden power failure can be more of a problem than with HDDs, and if a chip fails then all the data on it is lost, a scenario not applicable to magnetic drives). [...]
SSDs experience significantly higher rates of uncorrectable errors (which cause data loss) than do HDDs. [...]
Are power outages killing your SSDs?
[...] Of the 15 drives (10 different models, from five vendors), only one drive model, from one vendor, had no failures of any sort. One device failed completely (SSD #1), while one-third of SSD #3 became unusable due to metadata corruption. The other SSDs all exhibited various types of data corruption when they unexpectedly lost power, including the high-end enterprise SSDs with SLC NAND and supercapacitors. [...]
The implications of this research are significant. It suggests that SSDs, including enterprise SSDs, should not be trusted to behave in the proper fashion, or to be as robust as HDDs. [...]Source: ExtremeTech
Investigating Power Outage Effects on Reliability of Solid-State Drives
[...] we show that failures in SSDs are not only due to volatile DRAM cache but also we observe similar failures in SSDs with disabled internal cache.Source: Cornell Tech | arXiv
Therefore, in summary:
- SSDs experience significantly higher catastrophic failure ratios due to power loss than do HDDs (ex: bricked device, metadata corruption, uncorrectable errors, ...).
- SSDs, including enterprise SSDs, should not be trusted to be as robust as HDDs.
Questions
- Is my summary correct?
- Are desktop users really experiencing higher failure rates with SSDs than with HDDs?
- Should desktop users indeed be worried about bricked SSDs due to power loss?