kinney :
Hm lot of Intel SSD haters. I hope people realize that Samsung has a worse reliability record than Intel here.
Intel>Crucial/Micron>Samsung is the pecking order on quality SSDs. They've all had problems, but in order of quality/reliability superiority that's how it comes out for those who have been paying attention. It is true that they don't always the best value, but that's another discussion.
Speaking for myself, and I suspect many others who've commented above, the issue is not so much about reliability as it is about Intel effectively placing a hard limit on the life of this drive.
Let's say I buy a new car that has a 5 year, 150,000km warranty. Once I cross the 150,000km mark, I understand there's an ever increasing risk of a major component of that car failing. That's fine, I understand the manufacturer can only accept wear & tear liability to a certain point. I also understand that if I decide to quit my job and become a full time Uber driver, I'm going to rack up those kilometres and exceed my warranty really quickly. Again, that's fine, I'm an adult, I understand those risks and can make an informed decision about whether I choose to keep running the car and deal with the costs of failure myself, or replace it.
What Intel has done is effectively set a hard limit on the life of their drive such that the moment the endurance point of the warranty period is reached, it will no longer operate at all and must be replaced... the consumer who paid for and owns the drive has absolutely no say in the matter. As this article spells out it's actually slightly worse than setting a hard kilometre (or miles) driven limit, because SSDs themselves effectively clock up writes internally with their own internal maintenance tasks. At least with a car and km (/m) limit, the owner is in complete control of how far they choose to drive.
Now Intel would likely argue that my analogy is flawed because where a car might break down, the risk for the SSD is that exceeding the endurance rating could result in in users losing critical data. So, the argument goes, their "feature" is implemented to protect users. That's a feeble argument on a number of levels:
1) If they genuinely believe this is of benefit to consumers, why don't they advertise it anywhere? Why isn't the "feature" listed on product pages or **at least** tech support pages for the product
2) Given that the OS will simply fail to boot and report a drive failure, many users are likely to think that the drive has completely failed and replace it or their entire computer, thus losing their data anyway. We can't know for certain, but I'd suggest that the risk of users losing data through this assumption of complete drive failure is significantly higher than the actual risk which Intel are claiming to be protecting us from anyway
3) If this feature is genuinely in place to protect users from data loss, why is the same TBW rating in place for the entire capacity range? Why is the NAND in the 512GB model able to cope with just one quarter of the write cycles of the 128GB drives?
Even if you somehow cling to the argument that this "feature" really is in place to protect non-technical users, there is absolutely no excuse for not providing more technical users with the ability to turn it off and use the drive they bought until it actually fails... rather than just reaches an arbitrary cap that Intel has put in place.
So for me, this is nothing to do with reliability. It's about Intel hard-coding the death of my drive at a point when they've determined that I've used it enough and should get a new one, and then trying to justify it with weak arguments which do not hold up under scrutiny.
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