Solid State Disks – are they any more reliable than HDDs?
Drop them, throw them, put them in water, they’ll keep working! I remember when CDs were touted to have such reliability, even NASA was using Compact Disc technology with 9-year-old children having to explain it to us:
I have a feeling we might look back in a few years in the same about solid state drives. Yes, they have some benefits, but also some drawbacks. In the last week, two SSDs have come in for recovery. An early 16GB mini PCI-E device found in a Dell mini using a STEC controller and a more modern 64GB OCZ Vertex 3. Bad news for the OCZ customer is that the Vertex 3 uses a SandForce controller, meaning the data is encrypted on the Flash NAND chips. The OCZ Vertex 4 have moved back to using Indilinx controllers which hopefully will not encrypt the data which should allow for greater possibilities when it comes to data recovery.
The process of recovering data from SSDs is a challenging one, and consequently, the pricing for the recovery of data from these devices can be somewhat high than that of hard disk drives. Do back up your data, particularly if you have a SandForce controller.