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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."
Rejoice then, you still have 75 SSDs!
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has anyone tried this with platter drives?
A few years ago, Google published a study of hard disk failures. Failures were not correlated with how much data was written or read. Failures were correlated with the amount of time the disk was spun up, so you should idle a drive not in active use. Failures were negatively correlated with temperature: drives kept cooler were MORE likely to fail.
that reminds me ... I should do a backup ....
i could live a little longer in this prison
Good luck with that. This experiment has been running since Aug 20, 2013 and running almost continuously at that. Even the heaviest consumer/prosumer work load would have trouble reaching the amount of data written in this experiment.
Not that much higher for streaming reads and writes, the new Seagate 6TB can do 220MB/s @128KB streaming reads or writes. That works out to ~19TB/day so it would only take around 2 months to hit 1PB.
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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.
"I've got 5 and all are well. 1 Intel, 2 Samsung and 1 Critical. "
That apparently doesn't prevent you from dropping bits, though. 1+2+1=4.
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Yes, they are sooo reliable, every single SDD I've bought has been dead within 3 months.
A happy OCZ customer, I take it?
While ShanghaiBill apparently struggles with the English language, the phase "you should idle a drive not in active use" means the drive will spin up fewer times. You should disable spin down and leave the drive idling, not on standby.
You'll reduce the number of head load/unloads.
You'll reduce peak current consumption of the spindle motor.
The drive will stay at a more stable temperature.
Amen to this, I STUPIDLY bought a REFURBISHED OCZ drive which, coincidentally failed shortly after OCZ announced bankrupcy. The other drive I bought was a Corsair that, like it's OCZ bretheren died three weeks after put into service. The speed is wonderful but the life is pathetic. Despite this, I have a Kingston and a Samsung which are both going strong so I can confidently state that HALF OF ALL SSDs FAIL AFTER THREE WEEKS, THE OTHER RUN FOREVER!
Perhaps I need to work on my sample set and my over-use of capital letters.
"I don't recall the brand of the fourth"
:-)
There you go again.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There was also a very interesting endurance test done on extremesystems.org. Very impressive stuff. I don't yet own an SSD, but I'll continue to consider buying one! Maybe next Black Friday. Just waiting for the right deal.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Tape actually has pretty high transfer rates. Its seek times are what sucks, but if you're doing a dump of tape you arent doing any seeking at all.
That's a heck of a lot of data, and certainly more than most folks will write in the lifetimes of their drives.
Continued write cycling [...]
That's just ridiculous. Since when the reliability is measured in how many petabytes can be written?
Spinning disks can be forced into inefficient patterns, speeding up the wear on mechanics.
SSDs can be easily forced to do a whole erase/write cycle just by writing single bytes into the wrong sector.
There is no need to waste bus bandwidth with a petabyte of data.
The problem was never the amount of the information.
The problem was always the IO pattern which might accelerate the wear of the the media.
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We seem to have the beginning of a trend here - AC's don't have very good luck with SSD's.
Try logging in and see if that changes your outlook.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's curious. Almost all of the drive failures I've seen can be attributed to head damage from repeated parking prior to spin-down, whereas all the drives that I've kept spinning continuously have kept working essentially forever. And drives left spun down too long had a tendency to refuse to spin up.
I've had exactly one drive that had problems from spinning too much, and that was just an acoustic failure (I had the drive replaced because it was too darn noisy). With that said, that was an older, pre-fluid-bearing drive. I've never experienced even a partial bearing failure with newer drives.
It seems odd that their conclusions recommended precisely the opposite of what I've seen work in practice. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that my sample size is much smaller than Google's sample size, so it is possible that the failures I've seen are a fluke, but the differences are so striking that it leads me to suspect other differences. For example, Google might be using enterprise-class drives that lack a park ramp....
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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.
No, I logged in and I've still got Outlook 2007.
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