20 Percent of SSD Notebooks Failing?

The whole reason to pay the obscene premium for a SSD is because it’s supposed to be way more reliable than your average spinny hard drive. According to an analyst at Avian Securities, however, an unnamed “large computer manufacturer” is having 10 to 20 percent of its flash-based notebooks sent back because of technical failure—and still more are being sent back for not matching purchasers’ expectations for a total of 20 to 30 percent of SSD-based notebooks getting the heave-ho.

Keep in mind that the return rate for standard hard drive failures is only about one to two percent. Crave narrows down the most probable manufacturer to be Dell, who pointed out when admitting that SSDs suck for small data packets (like in Outlook) that Samsung is about to drop a new SSD that doesn’t cry itself to a slow churn when faced with them. Not exactly an admission, but about the best you could expect out of a flack.

That said, it doesn’t really address the whole issue of a 20 percent fail rate, which doesn’t exactly stoke the lines with people ready to throw down the platinum card. [Crave]