14 DAY TRIAL // Recent reports coming from Avi Cohen, general partner at Avian Securities, claimed that large notebook PC vendors were experiencing return rates of between 20 and 30 percent in their SSD-enabled notebook offerings as a result of SSD failures and unmatched product expectations.
According to the report, Dell was one of the "major notebook PC vendors" that experienced issues with the solid-state drives manufactured by Samsung. However, Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden claimed that the return rates were pretty inaccurate.
"The recently published analyst report estimating a high return rate for Solid State Drive technology (SSD) in Dell products is unfounded and wholly inaccurate, by orders of magnitude," Camden claimed in an official statement for tech website Extremetech.
According to Dell's Camden, the customers seem to be pleased with the benefits of the solid-state storage technology and especially their reliability. Moreover, market analyst Gartner reveals that the use of hard disk drives is one of the two most important factors that lead to system failure. Given the fact that solid-state drives have no moving parts, they are increasingly resistant to mechanical shocks and vibrations.
More than that, Camden made it very clear that the second generation of solid-state drives from Samsung are more reliable than any conventional hard-disk on the market. "Dell sees SSD as the future of mobility storage and offers the technology across a wide variety of laptop models, including business, consumer and mobile workstations," she concluded.
Camden's statement is also backed up by Jim Handy, flash memory analyst with Objective Analysis, who claimed he never actually got reports regarding system failure as a result of using SSDs. Handy also alleged that the misleading reports about the reliability of solid-state media are just rumors emerging from "Taiwan and Asia."
"All my impressions are that there's so few shipping that they're probably using them for rugged applications rather than for speed," Handy said. "There's not going to be a lot of returns for unsatisfactory performance."
All in all, it seams that Avi Cohen's failure rate estimations were multiplied by ten, which is strange, because Avian Securities has nothing to share with the solid-state drive industry.