How reliable are Solid State Drives?

SSDs are so unreliable that no one uses them and no one is going to recommend it. /sarcasm

RAID 0 won't affect the lifespan of individual drives, but it might affect the lifespan of your data.

Its not recommended to RAID 0 using different performing drives.

SAS drives can go at any of the speeds of a SATA drive - you can get 10k or 15k ones, but most are 7200. It's just a different interface with more enterprise-level features.

No point in a WD black over blue or a barracuda.

SSDs are generally pretty reliable, especially against shock loadings. However, when the fail, they fail and there's usually not a lot you can recover.

RAID 0 isn't a great idea; you just double your failure rates. Once you've got an SSD, storage is unlikely to be a bottleneck.

PS: Start off with a 240+GiB drive; no point in going lower.

ssds last well if you buy a decent one, raid 0 just increases the chance of data loss as if one dies all the data is gone.

Depends on the SSD you get. Some can be buggier than others. Intel being one of them

Some of their SSD's used to disappear all the time (firmware probs or something. Dont know if they've it yet tho

The other build here is fine with a Samsung SSD. Only had it since July tho.

ssd's are fine (though of course sometimes it fails)
but, compared to ssd's years ago (sata2 era) they are now reliable with little chance of failing.
i have an old ssd, intel, which is still rocking. i think it's 4-5yrs old already (sata 2 ssd) and i also have a newer one which runs well also

There are two separate (and very much potential) 'issues' with SSDs.

1) They rely on firmware which in the past, with specific drives in specific use-cases, has been responsible for various issues including in some extreme cases 'bricking' a drive.
2) All SSDs, because of the nature of NAND, can only sustain a certain amount of writes before they cannot reliably hold a charge and thus become unreliable.

In the case of #1, the extreme cases were mostly some years ago when the industry was much more in its infancy and plagued certain manufacturers in particular who were probably cutting corners in validation (OCZ, for example). Throughout the history of SSDs the likes of Intel, Samsung and others have established very good reputations for reliability (though notably there has been a recent performance issue, now patched, with the popular Samsung 840 EVO: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-releases-firmware-update-to-fix-the-ssd-840-evo-read-performance-bug). Get a good brand and there is no more chance of a critical SSD failure than you have if you buy a traditional mechanical HDD.

RE #2 This issue, and of posted on this numbers of times before, has been massively, massively overblown. Even the lowest endurance SSDs are rated at 1000 writes per block, have overprovisioning and wear levelling algorithms to ensure that writes are distributed evenly. That means the lowest-endurance SSD (say a 120GB drive with 1000 writes), can sustain around 120TB of writes... writes that is remember, not reads. You would have to write (WRITE!) 110GB of data to the drive every day, 365 days a year to reach the endurance rating in 3 years. There have been various posts of people stress-testing drives and reaching 5 or even 10 times more than the reported endurance rating before issues start to arise.

Check out Anandtech's report on the (low endurance) 840 EVO: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/samsung-ssd-840-evo-review-120gb-250gb-500gb-750gb-1tb-models-tested/3
It's just not an issue!

Are there specific use-cases where a consumer SSD is a bad idea, yes (e.g. write intensive databases). Is even the most active computer user likely to exceed the write endurance of a consumer SSD before the drive itself becomes outdated or warrants an upgrade... no, absolutely not.

SSDs are now extremely reliable, get a good brand and you're every bit as safe as you are with a HDD... of course that means you need backups if you value your data... but it's at least as safe as it is on a mechanical disk.

Get an SSD... simple.

There's a reason just about every tech site recommends an SSD as the most significant upgrade you can make to an old computer, and an essential component of anything but the most absolute budget of PCs.

It's about the responsiveness of your computer. If doesn't really show up on benchmarks and it's hard to quantify, but you watch the responses to your last post. Just about everyone who has an SSD in their system will tell you that they'll never go back to an OS on mechanical drive again. The difference is massive.

The reliability issues just aren't issues. Move your programs around every day of the year and you'll still be nowhere near the write capacity.

If you care about your computer's performance at all (which you obviously do if you're considering a WD VR) get an SSD. Even a cheaper SSD destroys a WD VR (like a 100 times faster or more) in random read & write performance.

See the above answer, and that's for one of the lowest write tolerance SSDs around. You won't hit 250TiB (which is what you get from a 250GiB 840 EVO) inside a decade.

It's more than a few seconds, and makes everything else faster.

I have been using a Kingston SSD for about a year and a half now. No issues whatsoever and im still amazed at how fast it is.

Crucial MX100 or Samsung EVO 840 are the two picks for me at the moment. Both well established brands and (particularly the Crucial) priced very competitively.

850 Pro is the undisputed fastest, but unless you have some crazy workloads, the HDD -> SSD transition is so massive that the differences between SSDs for 'normal' tasks are pretty hard to distinguish.

Yeah, but because s/he's so worried about the reliability I thought picking an MLC instead of TLC one might be good. Near impossible that it will get worn out, but might as well.

about the reliability due to usage, if you compute it, it will take years. also take note that even HDD's will fail after a few years.
and besides, by that time, you will probably upgrade or a new and better technology will be available.

is it worth it, yes. i have 2 of them. i will never go back to a mechanical drive for a boot drive (and some games)
it loads application A LOT faster. i don't like waiting for things to load. things will be snappy,
under normal usage you won't wear it out that quickly