I haven't quite been able to grasp why Toms Hardware, which I view largely as a consumer/enthusiast review site would choose to analyze the failure rates of SSD's in a datacenter environment. How about going to IT departments that have "floater" laptops and seeing how long the drives hold up in those? I think the primary consumer reasons for purchasing SSD's are increased battery life and physical fault tolerance in laptops not the expectation that they'll outlast a standard HDD in a server setting.
> I haven't quite been able to grasp why Toms Hardware, which I view largely as a consumer/enthusiast review site would choose to analyze the failure rates of SSD's in a datacenter environment.
It could just be that there is not enough good data from the consumer market to make solid conclusions from. DCs use drives in large numbers, so you are going to get "concentrated" readings.
considering how much randomness can clump failures and successes, a small set of consumer used stories with hardware from different vendors, or even disparate IT departments with their "floaters" will leave you with a result you can't be sure of. the first company they mention had maybe 100s of drives and hadn't had a failure yet. it was only the larger companies that had reliable data. what might be interesting is the data from apple's ipods etc.
