On a RAID 0 array built out of 4 Corsair Force F240 SSDs, we have had THREE failures so far – within a total time span of two months. This makes an average of one failure every two and a half weeks.<\/p>\n
The first two failures happened after 5 days of building the array. After replacing the failed drive with a new one, the array failed again – promptly – within 5 more days.<\/p>\n
The third time was somewhat the charm – the array lasted about six weeks. Then, it failed again.<\/p>\n
There is a direct correlation between the amount of stress we put on the array and the failure rates we experienced. Testing the installation of InstallAware itself, for example, on 4 VMs simultaneously – that is almost 9GB of data being installed onto 4 VMs all at the same time – stresses the array. Watching the VMs just “fly through” the data was fun: a joy to watch indeed, all four main progress bars, jumping forward in unison, quickly and efficiently…letting our Q&A move on to the actual job of testing our main product after installation.<\/p>\n
This joy would unfortunately disappear when, powering on this testbed the next day, one of the drives would have been found to have “bricked” itself during its powered off state. Yes, that is correct: the drive would brick itself somehow, magically almost, when it was powered off. As long as the system was running, there would be no indications of failure.<\/p>\n
We decided to consciously reduce the amount of stress after receiving the THIRD replacement drive from Corsair. We still needed to do our job, of course – install InstallAware every now and then inside a particular VM configuration; to test the new features and bug fixes in that build.<\/p>\n
And it seems the most these drives were able to last us was no more than six weeks!<\/p>\n
Makes for a sad product indeed.<\/p>\n
We have contacted Corsair for a full refund on the purchase of all four drives, as apparently replacing the spontaneously bricked items just buys us two and a half weeks on average. We don’t have time to keep rebuilding this array, re-imaging the machine, over and over again.<\/p>\n
Lesson learned: Avoid the Corsair Force series like the plague!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On a RAID 0 array built out of 4 Corsair Force F240 SSDs, we have had THREE failures so far – within a total time span of two months. This makes an average of one failure every two and a half weeks. The first two failures happened after 5 days of building the array. After … <\/p>\n