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Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs
crookedvulture (1866146) writes "Last year, we kicked off an SSD endurance experiment to see how much data could be written to six consumer drives. One petabyte later, half of them are still going. Their performance hasn't really suffered, either. The casualties slowed down a little toward the very end, and they died in different ways. The Intel 335 Series and Kingston HyperX 3K provided plenty of warning of their imminent demise, though both still ended up completely unresponsive at the very end. The Samsung 840 Series, which uses more fragile TLC NAND, perished unexpectedly. It also suffered a rash of cell failures and multiple bouts of uncorrectable errors during its life. While the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, all six SSDs exceeded their rated lifespans by hundreds of terabytes. The fact that all of them wrote over 700TB is a testament to the endurance of modern SSDs."
You might want to do a bit of math before making such a statement. 700TB is a very large amount of data. And in order to do that in a week, would require quite a bit of data transfer bandwidth. To wit:
700,000,000,000,000 / 7 days = 100,000,000,000,000 / 24 hours = 4,166,666,666,666 / 3600 seconds = 1,157,407,407 bytes per second.
Do you really write 1.157GB/second every second for a week? And if so, what data interface are you using? I'd really like to know since SATA 3.0 can only handle 600MB/second. Perhaps you're using SATA 3.2 which does have the required speed?
Now in an environment using multiple drives, you can get to the 700TB mark much more rapidly with much lower per drive bandwidth. But then again, that's not the test criteria. They are testing how much endurance individual SSDs have.
If seeking does wear a drive, then using an SSD for files that generates lots of seeks will not only greatly speed up the computer, but also extend the life of HDDs relegated to storing big files.