I've had one fail three days ago on a laptop that was barely a year old. I'm not even sure what actually failed - debugging a broken ssd is a pain, and when I mount it it just freezes for ages, making the matter worse.
Sandisk being the only real seller of those things there isn't exactly a lot of competition but I'd like to actually see how they hold up vs. regular SSDs. There is a bit of a false expectation when you buy a laptop with a ssd, expecting the endurance of a regular ssd and getting something potentially awfully bad.
You're right, sort of. Most of the time that's certainly the case. But OCZ QA appears to have fallen off a cliff at some point, to the extent where it was presumably a large factor in their bankruptcy, and it was a systemic problem with most OCZ models.
A huge list of models have failure rates way above average, with a number of them exceeding 5%, and some claiming that the failure rate for some of the Octane and Petrol models exceeded 30%.
The best ones have been in line with other manufacturers, though. Unfortunately the problems were so widespread that your odds of picking a "safe" OCZ drive for a while were ridiculously bad, unless you were prepared to wait for a year or two to get hard numbers on a model before buying.
The Vertex line has been a crapshot, for example. Several of the Vertex 2 models had unreasonably high failure rates (5%-10% range). Your Vertex LE is as far as I know based on a different design/controller than the regular Vertex 2 and might have "escaped" the Vertex 2 problems. The Vertex 3 appears to have been much better (and none of the Vertex 3's we have have failed). Vertex 4 has been disastrously bad for us - every single one failed hard after less than a year, to the point where even the SMART data is partially corrupted on most of the drives (claiming it's been powered on for 75 million years for example..), and marked the end of buying OCZ drives for our part.
I've had one fail three days ago on a laptop that was barely a year old. I'm not even sure what actually failed - debugging a broken ssd is a pain, and when I mount it it just freezes for ages, making the matter worse.
Sandisk being the only real seller of those things there isn't exactly a lot of competition but I'd like to actually see how they hold up vs. regular SSDs. There is a bit of a false expectation when you buy a laptop with a ssd, expecting the endurance of a regular ssd and getting something potentially awfully bad.