Six terabyte Solid state drive!:

Originally posted by twhitehead
New technology takes a while to get the kinks worked out.
I have noticed that thumb drives have got much more reliable and easier to use over time. When they first came out you had to tell the OS to 'disconnect' the drive before unplugging it or risk damaging it. Improvements were made to both the software and hardware to overcome that difficulty. I have ...[text shortened]... .

Ultimately though, whatever your storage mechanism is, if its important to you, back it up!

Sure, but I think this has more to do with finance than engineering. They cannot have failed to have noticed the problem in development. What is new in SSD drives is the storage space available, not the actual kit. This technology has been around, in one way or another, for at least two decades. They knew about the problem and didn't put capacitance protection in.

I think that there are two reasons for this. First off, if you add a few more components to a device it costs more to make, but since most of the time the apparent to consumer behaviour is the same it is not in manufacturers' interests to add power cut off safety. Unless they have a marketing angle to sell the extra stuff they won't do it, full stop. It costs them more to produce the upgraded device that they cannot sell to the public for more money than the devices without it. In the meantime SSD failures have racked up and people have started complaining so they have their marketing angle.

The other, rather cynical, point I'll make here is that the duff SSD's had to be replaced. The user did not necessarily have warranty and did not automatically realise they had a warranty, in the general sense of realise which includes knowing about the warranty but not doing anything about it as well as the more straightforward not noticing. They make these things by the million and I suspect that it's non-trivial changing the manufacturing process even for a relatively simple change.

What I'm getting at is they may well have made money selling cheaper but less reliable kit than they would have spent putting these protections into their devices.