MacBooks are destroying SSDs

drive-failuremacssdstorage

I'm opening this topic to find the cause of our SSD failure rate of +50%. We work with Mac (13" Macbook Pro & 13" Macbook Air), with installations of both Mac OSX Mountain Lion and Ubuntu. 90% of the users develop websites, the others do basic office work.

For now I tried the following brands:

  • OWC Mercury 6G: destroyed 5
  • OWC Aura Pro: destroyed 3
  • Intel 500: destroyed 2
  • Standard Apple SSD (sm256c): destroyed 2

All of this in less than one year!

The symptoms of a failing SSD are always more or less the same:

  • Extremely low read/write speeds (10MB/sec sequential)
  • Amnesia (chmod a directory, 5 minutes later the permissions are restored)
  • Lost files (/etc/hosts was gone)
  • Random crashes/hangs of software

From this I can conclude that the brand doesn't matter, enabling trim also doesn't make a difference. I also recommended leaving at least 30GB disk space free -> no difference.

What else could be the problem? We do run Mysql and Postgres databases on the machines, but I can't believe we're the only one having this problem. Is there some way we can track down what is causing our SSD's to fail?

Edit: So I think we all agree this isn't a normal behaviour. Do you know some OSX Applications which can monitor disk writes per application/process? I found some for Linux, but the majority of my users with this problem work on Mac OSX 10.8. Htop for example doesn't show me disk reads/writes in OSX, even under root.

Best Answer

I have not seen such high numbers or SSD failure rates on MacBooks in my organizations...

Things to consider:

  • Typically the SSD failures will be a result of wear out from write activity. Check to see if there are any processes/programs common to the laptops that may cause more wear than normal.
  • Use a tool like SMARTReporter to track S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics and indicators on the drives.
  • Ubuntu probably isn't the best OS to run natively on a MacBook. What do you do about firmware and platform updates?
  • OWC stands behind their products and have extremely long warranties on their SSDs. You should be in touch with their support to understand why the devices are failing. They may be able to give you more information than we can.
  • Please don't fill these drives up. I try to keep things below 70% utilization. Spec larger drives if you must.

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Edit:

For monitoring system and I/O activity, Apple's Process Monitor or something like gkrellm will help record read/write activity. It should be clear which processes become resource hogs.

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