[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[smallm at panix.com (Mike Small)]

Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> writes:
> Go ahead and trust SSDs on par with HDDs. I am going to hold off until
> I see it, let the young industry grow up a lot more.

Is the failure mode for SSDs different? It happened that a newish
Windows 7 machine I use at work ran out of memory and crashed without
syncing to disk one day last year. I was surprised to find that the SSD
on the machine had huge numbers of corrupt blocks across many source
files and system dlls (but somehow it limped along to boot and be
somewhat useable). The D: drive was a HDD and had no corruption at
all. 

Perhaps this is off topic since it was a software/OS (and not one most
here care about I assume, I know I don't)/file system "failure" not a
hardware failure. But it was very surprising to me. From experience at
home my expectation from unexpected shutdowns is just a long fsck at
next start up, at worst some file and directory structure that was
recently written being lost or corrupted. This was all over the place,
stuff that would have been opened for read and not written to
recently. I don't get it.