Reports from SSD purgatory

News update for anyone else who's trapped like me, waiting for a fix to
the Intel 320 SSD bug where they can truncate themselves to 8MB. Over
the weekend Intel has announced a firmware fix for the problem is done,
and is due to ship "within the next two weeks":
http://communities.intel.com/thread/24121

On the larger SSD reliability front, Tom's Hardware surveyed heavy SSD
users they're friendly with who use Intel drives. The most interesting
data came from Softlayer:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-6.html

This supports two claims I made before based on my private data that
were controversial:

-Annualized SSD failure rates are not significantly lower than
traditional drives in the first couple of years. Jury is still out on
whether they will spike upwards starting at 3 years as mechanical ones do.

-The most common source of dead drives is sudden, catastrophic
electronics failure. These are not predicted by SMART, and have nothing
to do with hitting the drive's wear limits.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us