Endurance testing SSD's to 1 Petabyte of data transfer

[nic2k4]

http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

They make some pretty interesting observations on the way drives die.

[Constant Gardener]

Interesting. I have an SSD on a gaming computer, and have no idea how long it will last, but when it does fail (a) it seems I will get some warning and (b) the replacement should be a lot cheaper.

[jman98]

Interesting. I have an SSD on a gaming computer, and have no idea how long it will last,

I read about a study last year (sorry, don't have a link) that basically discovered that the bigger the drive, the longer you should expect it to last. 128 GB was the smallest drive you could reasonably expect to last 5+ years. We've had a lot of posts here from people who bought 32 GB and 64 GB drives and based on the study I read, I would think if you get 3 years or more out of those small drives, you've done well.

You can find tips for SSDs for your OS on the internet, but if you're a gamer I'm guessing you run Windows. If you use Firefox, everybody with SSD tips suggests making a few changes so that it opens temporary files on a regular hard disk (assuming you have one) rather than the SSD. Also making sure Windows doesn't use the SSD for swap space is good, assuming that you have a hard disk you can use instead for that.

[fritzi93]

This paragraph was particularly interesting to me:

"The root cause of NAND's limited endurance is a little complicated. Flash stores information by trapping electrons inside nanoscale cells; the associated voltage defines the data. The "tunneling" process used to move electrons in and out of the cell is destructive, not only eroding the physical structure of the cell wall, but also causing stray electrons to become stuck in it. These errant electrons impart a negative charge of their own, reducing the range of voltages available to represent data. The narrower that range becomes, the more difficult it is for SSDs to perform writes and to verify their validity."

They say "limited endurance", but wow, even the drives that failed took a helluva lot of write cycling.

I have to wonder about the converse: There are well-known tips for prolonging the life of an SSD (keeping OS and programs only on an SSD, moving the page file, etc). Basically limiting write cycles as much as possible. If one does that, what kind of endurance could one reasonably expect? In all the articles I've read about SSDs, the authors seem reluctant to even take a guess.

[jman98]

fritizi93 - Decades of normal use is possible. But if you are a gamer and use the SSD for temp file storage or do a lot of write intensive things on the SSD, you probably shouldn't expect that. And again - bigger is better. 128 GB is the smallest size you should reasonably expect to last a long time. Personally, I wouldn't buy anything smaller than 256 GB to give myself the best chance for long life of the drive.

[Atak_Snajpera]

Cells used in modern SSDs can survive a lot more than "Life Meters" show.

My Goodram c100 120GB (Toshiba 19nm cells) is scaled to ~340 TiB. Obviously this is internal write counter so in practice due to WAF user will be able to "safely" write at least 110 TiB! This means that you could install Wolfenstein: New Order (40 GiB) game every day for almost 8 years !

This shows that all those "pro-tips" regarding optimizing applications (firefox and so on) are silly these days!