This is a little bit of a rant, but I also sort of want a serious answer:

I'm looking into getting an SSD system drive for my PC, but there seems to be a constant issue with firmware issues and bluescreens. What I want to know, is what is wrong with the manufacturers? I've never had to update the firmware on a mechanical drive. Modern mech drives have complex firmware, remapping bad blocks, etc, but I've never heard of a particular model of hard drive being so crappy that it just craps out to blue screens every few hours. It would never pass Seagate, WD, etc. testing labs. Also, flash cards like SDHC camera cards, compact flash, etc often have built-in wear leveling and error correction. And I've never had to update the firmware on an SD card. And, I shouldn't have to install any weird utilities or drivers at the OS to make it work properly either. Sure, turn on TRIM in the filesystem driver. That should be it. Apart from that, the drive should just look like a plain old mechanical drive on SATA to the OS, just one that's super fast.

What is going on? Do the programmers for SSD firmware just suck?

What SSD manufacturer and OS?

I've seen Intel drives on Windows 7 be about as robust as any other digital equipment ever manufactured. I've seen other drives (sadly, don't recall the brand offhand) on OSes with less than stellar drivers burn up and die in a matter of days.

You get what you pay for, caveat emptor, read the product reviews, etc. etc. :-)

I've seen Intel drives on Windows 7 be about as robust as any other digital equipment ever manufactured.
You get what you pay for, caveat emptor, read the product reviews, etc

I had a 120GB Intel SSD on Win7, and it's the only drive that's ever failed on me. I've never had an HDD failure.

I went to turn on my PC one day and it couldn't find the OS... Looked in the BIOS and my Intel drive was just plain missing. Completely dead without any warning, only 9 months after purchasing it!! The worst part was that I hadn't pushed to my remote Git repository for 2 weeks and put myself way behind schedule...

Intel's also had a massively wide-spread fuck-up with their firmware on their 120GB drives, like Draco is complaining about. If you have one, make sure you've updated to the latest firmware or you risk it being bricked! (a threat I've never faced with any other drive...)

General performance with an SSD is amazing, so I recommend them to everyone (I now have 2 - the replacement Intel and a 240GB SanDisk), but thanks to Intel I now also warn everyone to pair it with a HDD backup for when it dies.

I've had my 120GB Intel SSD for about six months now and it's still as fast as the day I unboxed it. I tend to view SSD's as efficient read-only storage, which can also be written to but only when absolutely necessary, and so I tend to only put operating systems and programs on them, and not actual documents - which also means I don't need to backup these drives as often - and I've never had any trouble. No firmware issues either, though I did have to enable AHCI in my BIOS to get the advertised speeds.

Of course, this is only my experience with a single drive. I'm sure one day this trusty drive will die on me, but I have taken my precautions. I second Apoch - do your homework and always read lots of product reviews on newegg and other websites, before deciding on a particular product. If more than a couple reviews say the drive blue-screened two weeks after purchase, you would do well to stay away from that drive, even if it's really cheap. A drive that doesn't work has infinite cost.

I've had my 120GB Intel SSD for about six months now and it's still as fast as the day I unboxed it. I tend to view SSD's as efficient read-only storage, which can also be written to but only when absolutely necessary, and so I tend to only put operating systems and programs on them, and not actual documents - which also means I don't need to backup these drives as often - and I've never had any trouble. No firmware issues either, though I did have to enable AHCI in my BIOS to get the advertised speeds.

lolwut? Why would you ever treat an SSD as read-only? They are so much faster than mechnanical hard drives! I have been SSD only for about 4 years now, and over 5 laptops and 2 desktops I have never had an issue. It's pretty easy to research ahead of time what SSD manufacturers are having firmware problems at the time and buy accordingly.

lolwut? Why would you ever treat an SSD as read-only? They are so much faster than mechnanical hard drives!

Any particular reason you need more than 100MB/s write throughput? Perhaps backups, but this applies only if you have multiple SSD's, since backup speed will be bounded by the slowest hard drive. Screen recording comes to mind, but your SSD will quickly run out of space if you do that, and that hits it pretty hard (not too much of a problem now, though). I really haven't got a need for very fast write (or read, for that matter) speeds. Low software latency and high IOPS is much more relevant to me and my SSD takes care of that very well, as all my executable stuff and operating system is on it.

PS: I didn't say strictly read-only, just that I wouldn't go writing gigabytes upon gigabytes of data on it every day. Mainly because I don't have a need for it, really (write limits are not relevant anymore).

Compiling any C++ project more than a few thousand LOC will benefit immensely from an SSD, both in terms of reads and writes. So much so that standard dev machine spec at work includes a large SSD, on which we put code, compiler temporaries, and a swapfile.

There are plenty of desktop apps that are disk bound, so the drive speed is more than worth the price of admission. I'm not sure where your 100MB/s numbers come from; industrial-strength single SSDs are in that range for write throughput, but traditional spinning disks are closer to 2-3MB/s on random writes. This is especially true of slower-RPM drives such as typically mounted in laptops, where going SSD will give you both vastly better battery life and much better disk performance.

[quote name='Hodgman' timestamp='1357609745' post='5018853']
I went to turn on my PC one day and it couldn't find the OS... Looked in the BIOS and my Intel drive was just plain missing.
[/quote]

Maybe it was not the drive. My motherboard fall apart piece for piece, one day my newest harddrive was not working any longer, the bios was not able to detect it. After some panic I plugged it to an other PC and it works flawless. My motherboard died a slow death, starting with the DVD-player, going over to different videocards, later a HDD drive and finally the last working ATI videocard stopped working. All components still work on my wifes PC !

There are plenty of stories I've seen over the years of non-SSD hard disk failures - I've not seen evidence that these days, SSD is worse?

i currently have two ssd drives, both from ocz. originally when i brought the first one, it died within 2 months of use, but ocz replaced it for free, so all has been good for the last year, when i purchased my laptop i brought a 240GB vertex3 for it, and i have never experienced any slow-downs from disk access, and load times for games are incredibly fast(but you should all know that stuff anyway).

in short, what manufacturer was the OP talking about?