We all know about the 'Newegg effect', ie., a disproportionate amount of reviews are negative, since people are more likely to comment about something only if it broke. If everybody who reads this votes, then we should be able to more accurately measure actual reliability.
Since I'm trying to do this as a short poll, this will limit how precise this data actually is. As such, I have to limit the scope of the poll as follows:
When answering this poll:
1. Only answer regarding your main computer.
2. Only answer regarding your experiences in the last 12 months.
The reasons for these limitations are as follows:
1. Have you ever heard the phrase, "Everybody knows somebody who owns a Honda"? Although this is mostly true, the phrase, "Everybody owns a Honda" is definitely not true. The same could be true when talking about computer parts. The phrase, "Everybody has had a computer hardware failure" may be true, but it does not follow that every computer has a hardware failure (limiting the scope of the statement to normalized MTBF numbers). Lastly, if I asked the question, "Have you ever had an SSD failure", this might artificially inflate the SSD failure numbers. Therefore, we must only talk about HDDs/SSDs in your main computer system. This will limit, but not eliminate, the risks of inflated numbers. An addendum is below.
2. The reason for this limitation is threefold: One, I want data of more recent HDDs/SSDs. Two, I'm trying to find situations similar to my own hard drive mishaps. My SSDs have died within 6 months, so I'm fairly certain that this wasn't caused by the MLC NAND wearing out. I just want to see how many of these just die before their time. Lastly, since SSDs are much younger than HDDs, this may unfairly inflate the HDD failure rates, since failure rates seem to increase over time.
Final caveat: I'm using the logical (as in Philosophy logic class) definition of the word 'some', id est, "At least one". Therefore, if I say, "I've had some SSDs fail", having only one SSD fail makes that statement true.
Getting to the end of what was supposed to be a short poll, I want to talk a little bit about the hopeful scope of this poll. This will only poll failure rates from the last 12 months, and will only poll failure rates on our main computers. One can see that there is an imprecision in this poll - it does not account for those of use who have multiple SSDs/HDDs in our computers. If I had 16 SSDs in my computer and one HDD, then my chances of reporting an SSD failure would be much higher than someone who had just one SSD in their computer. I realize this is an issue, but this is a tradeoff between poll precision and sample size. I'm already eliminating a large potential sample pool by limiting the scope of the poll to only our main computers. I don't think the added precision of talking about individual hard drives in our computers would offset the loss of sample size
Definition: SSD market penetration is going to be drastically lower than HDD market penetration. I will normalize the failure rates of each technology to the replies regarding each penetration. So if I only end up with 2 SSD failures and 8 HDD failures, this doesn't mean that SSDs are inherently more reliable. We will have to see how big the polling size is for each technology before we determine anything.
::sigh::
So finally:
What kind of permanent storage device do you have attached to your main computer, and has it failed within the last 12 months?
Please feel free to elaborate about the nature of your computers below. I know I'll be posting my sob story
![Razz :-P](./images/smilies/icon_razz.gif)