This week, both Lenovo and Dell wanted to talk about Solid State Drives, and the numerous articles that have recently been written in regards to failure rates. I’ve read several of them, and was tempted to post a few, but I decided to wait and see what the PC makers response would be, and low and behold we have a couple of major ones from the past few days. For an example of what I’m talking about, you can read this CNET article.
First off, Lionel Menchaca from the Direct2Dell blog:
Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts
Sometimes we have to react to information that has no basis in reality. That’s what we’re dealing with here.
A recent analyst document from Avian Securities incorrectly stated that Dell is seeing high return rates (20 – 30%) due to performance issues and failures on solid state disk drives (SSDs). It has been the basis of conversations in the blogosphere like Crave, Gizmodo, Techcrunch and BloggingStocks.
Here’s the real story: the 20 – 30% failure and return rates cited by Avian Securities don’t even vaguely resemble what’s happening in our business. It’s also true that Avian did not contact us while doing their research. Said another way, it’s just not true.
Our global reliability data shows that SSD drives are equal to or better than traditional hard disk drives we’ve shipped. Beyond that, return rates for SSDs are in line with our expectations for new technology and an order of magnitude better than rates reported in the press.
Next up to bat, Lenovo’s Inside the Box blog: