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Taking a Hard Look At SSD Write Endurance

Posted by timothy on from the now-it's-just-a-budget-question dept.

New submitter jyujin writes "Ever wonder how long your SSD will last? It's funny how bad people are at estimating just how long '100,000 writes' are going to take when spread over a device that spans several thousand of those blocks over several gigabytes of memory. It obviously gets far worse with newer flash memory that is able to withstand a whopping million writes per cell. So yeah, let's crunch some numbers and fix that misconception. Spoiler: even at the maximum SATA 3.0 link speeds, you'd still find yourself waiting several months or even years for that SSD to start dying on you."

7 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Holy idiocy batman by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    100000 writes? 1M writes?

    What the fuck is this submitter smoking?

    Newer NAND flash can sustain maybe 3000 writes per cell, and if it's TLC NAND, maybe 500 to 1000 writes.

    1. Re:Holy idiocy batman by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The AC is dead-on right. At 25nm the endurance for high-quality MLC cells is about 3,000 writes. That's a relatively conservative estimate so you are pretty much guaranteed to get the 3K writes and likely somewhat more, but it's a far far cry from the 100K writes you can get from the highly expensive SLC chips. Intel & Micron claimed that one of the big "improvements" in the 20nm process was hi-K gates that are claimed to maintain the 3K write endurance at 20nm, which otherwise would have dropped even more from the 25nm node.

      The author of the article went to all the time & trouble to do his mathematical analysis without spending 10 minutes to find out the publicly available information about how real NAND in the real world actually performs....

      --
      AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    2. Re:Holy idiocy batman by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      He referenced specific models. A hyperlink is not the only way to refer to a source. You were given enough information to find the source easily.

  2. Re:Tried It - Disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have never had a laptop hard drive last more than two years, and only had one last more than eighteen months. Maybe your spinning-metal-one-micron-away-from-the-drive-head drives work well in a stationary, temperature-controlled environment, I guess.

  3. I Know People Like You by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I have never had a laptop hard drive last more than two years, and only had one last more than eighteen months. Maybe your spinning-metal-one-micron-away-from-the-drive-head drives work well in a stationary, temperature-controlled environment, I guess.

    I know people like you. Their laptops never last, their screens are always splattered and often cracked, their iPods and ear buds are always breaking, their power cords are always twisted and frayed.

    But my stuff lasts for years. My present laptop, a Dell Precision, is dated 2007. It's been all over the world, in filthy closets, big server rooms, up radio towers, on boats... I'd like to get a new one. But, I can't justify the replacement because my present laptop is in MINT condition save for the battery. Mint.

    Some people take care of their stuff, many people don't.

  4. Re: Tried It - Disappointed by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So then you only use magnetic tape for storage?
    How long does it take to boot from that?

    I have backups, so I can always restore.

  5. Re:Tried It - Disappointed by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have a very old (I think I bought it circa 2004 or so, it has turion cpu). Display hinges failed in it as well as cooling so I can't play games on it anymore (discreet GPU).

    Hard drive is trucking on fine.

    Some hard drives obviously last less. However if you have systemic problem with hard drives lasting less then two years, it's time to take a look at the factor that remains the same between these hard drives: user.