The SSDs that failed

The OEM went silent. We reported the issues, opened RMAs. To say I am not pleased … well … These are Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 units. According to their site

Ummm … no. Not even close. We are experiencing about a 70% failure rate, within 3 months of acquisition. In many different chassis, in many different parts of the world, with many different power supplies, many different motherboards. This is a time correlated failure. I have never … ever … in 25+ years doing this stuff … ever … seen anything like this. Its either a really … really bad silicon error in a controller chip or a firmware bug … or some other crappy part. We firmly unrecommend this unit. Do not purchase it. Our customers have experienced grief and lost data from it.

Imagine for a moment, you have these in a RAID 1 configuration. And because of the the failure, the unit refuses to get past the POST section. So there you are, with a remote machine, say, I dunno, 6000 miles away from you, and an SSD, with a putative 100+ year MTBF fails, and fails in a way that stops POST. So the system on reboot, freezes at the drive detection phase. Imagine that. Would suck if your OS were on one of these, you could never get it to boot. Without being there. Did I mention it was 6000 miles away? The purpose of a RAID1 is precisely … to give you time to deal with this sort of problem, by allowing you to run on one unit, and even reboot, with simply a failed unit. This is, IMO unforgivable. We have (to our customer base) done a mass change out of the Corsair’s for another unit from another vendor, after discussing this problem with the other vendor, and receiving assurances that their units do not operate in this manner. If you happen to be from Corsair, by all means, contact us at the day job. We just spent ~$10k USD cleaning up your mess. We’d love to hear how you are going to fix this. You can start by buying back all the failed units. Did I mention that the failure was time correlated and global? As in on multiple continents? Epic fail. (yeah, I’m pissed)