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Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive
MojoKid writes "Although they haven't been big hits with enthusiasts, Samsung's solid state drives have been successful due to strong relationships with a number of OEMs, including Apple. With the release of their new SSD 830 Series Solid State Drives, however, Samsung appears ready to make inroads with enthusiasts as well. The SSD 830 tested here is 256GB model, with eight 32GB Samsung NAND flash memory chips, 256MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory, and a new Samsung SSD Controller. The Samsung controller features a 3-ARM core design with support for SATA III 6Gb/s interface speeds. Performance-wise, the Samsung SSD 830 Series drive offered the best Read performance of the group that was tested, even versus the latest SandForce-based SSDs, though the SSD 830 couldn't quite catch SandForce in writes."
"If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles"
You would have to be very lucky, since such a creature does not exist.
Maintaining a count of how many times any given cell has been written would take a lot more memory (not to mention processing power) than these devices contain.
Instead, what they do is over-provision, so that a detected bad block is replaced with a spare. (Most hard drives do much the same thing.) However, there are only so many spares.
As someone else mentioned: with any real luck your firmware might report what percentage of those "spare" cells are left. If it doesn't, then you are left with sudden unexpected failure when the last of them is used up and another cell goes bad.