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Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes
crookedvulture writes The SSD Endurance Experiment previously covered on Slashdot has reached another big milestone: two freaking petabytes of writes. That's an astounding total for consumer-grade drives rated to survive no more than a few hundred terabytes. Only two of the initial six subjects made it to 2PB. The Kingston HyperX 3K, Intel 335 Series, and Samsung 840 Series expired on the road to 1PB, while the Corsair Neutron GTX faltered at 1.2PB. The Samsung 840 Pro continues despite logging thousands of reallocated sectors. It has remained completely error-free throughout the experiment, unlike a second HyperX, which has suffered a couple of uncorrectable errors. The second HyperX is mostly intact otherwise, though its built-in compression tech has reduced the 2PB of host writes to just 1.4PB of flash writes. Even accounting for compression, the flash in the second HyperX has proven to be far more robust than in the first. That difference highlights the impact normal manufacturing variances can have on flash wear. It also illustrates why the experiment's sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions about the durability of specific models. However, the fact that all the drives far exceeded their endurance specifications bodes well for the endurance of consumer-grade SSDs in general.
No, I think it means that the first ones were over-engineered, and the next generation will meet their stated MTBF number to within 1 standard deviation.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Most hard drive I see in consumer and business use write far less than that over their lifetimes. I have a customers hard drive I am copying data from currently. Has 15,147 power on hours, it has only written 1.3TB of data. It's very uncommon to see drives with over 6TB of data written (in the 500GB to 1TB drive range).
The other client SSD in my computer is a Samsung 830 256GB SSD that I just migrated to a 1TB SSD for a customer. Was used for about a year and a half before they needed a bigger drive. They used Outlook, a number of Autocad applications, lots of project files, a good sized collection of work related photos. The drive has 995GB of writes and is showing no SMART issues.
Average computer users have nothing to worry about when it comes to wearing a SSD out. Power users might have a problem depending on the nature of their work, but they also get the most benefit from high write speeds and IOPS. Servers, depending on their usage patters could have a problem, I certainly recommend the enterprise style drives that reserve a much larger amount of space.
Of course video writing is the perfect application for hard drives. A constant datastream at a fixed rate and large amounts of data over time, with few random IO and only bulk delete. If you are trying to stick a SSD in a PVR you are doing it wrong.
The only weakness is that it needs to be repeated on newer ssds as they hit the market. The results of this test are relevant for drives released back when the experiment started in 2013, less so for drives released now and even less so for future drives. As the manufacturers realise that the drives are lasting much longer than they are specified to, they'll decide they are overengineered and rework them to wear out quicker. Aside from the obvious cost cutting benefit, it also keeps the market segmented in various grades between "low end consumer ssds" and "high end enterprise ssds".