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Endurance Experiment Kills Six SSDs Over 18 Months, 2.4 Petabytes
crookedvulture writes Slashdot has previously covered The Tech Report's SSD Endurance Experiment, and the final chapter in that series has now been published. The site spent the last 18 months writing data to six consumer-grade SSDs to see how much it would take to burn their flash. All the drives absorbed hundreds of terabytes without issue, far exceeding the needs of typical PC users. The first one failed after 700TB, while the last survived an astounding 2.4 petabytes. Performance was reasonably consistent throughout the experiment, but failure behavior wasn't. Four of the six provided warning messages before their eventual deaths, but two expired unexpectedly. A couple also suffered uncorrectable errors that could compromise data integrity. They all ended up in a bricked, lifeless state. While the sample size isn't large enough to draw definitive conclusions about specific makes or models, the results suggest the NAND in modern SSDs has more than enough endurance for consumers. They also demonstrate that very ordinary drives can be capable of writing mind-boggling amounts of data.
The fact that 2 of them died without warning is disappointing. I would rather have a shorter life time, but a clear indication that the drive is going to die.
The fact that it is a drive means it is going to fail.
You have been warned.
This is simply not true. NAND cell wear degradation causes them to stop holding charge, which means data consistency is not guaranteed once a cell is degraded.
Intel's limit may be artificial, but there's logic behind the decision.
It's an irrelevant point anyway. Intel's documented behavior says pretty much that the drive will stop functioning once the wear parameter is exceeded. You can tell at any time what that parameter is, and when it will be exceeded. Your failure to act on that information will cause you to lose data, and that's your fault.
SATA revision 3.0 = 6 Gbit/s
DDR3 - 1600 = 12800 MB/s
"MB" = Mega-BYTES, so multiply by 8 for bits/seconds
DDR3 - 1600 = 102400 Mbits/s
DDR3 - 1600 = 102.400 Gbits/s
So, the peak bandwidth is about 17 times faster!
Now, let's look at latency.
Typical DDR RAM latency is around 10 ns (give or take, but that is an average number)
Typical SSD latency is around 0.1 us, which is around 100 ns. About ten times more.
One more thing here about these numbers.... An SSD is **NOT** RAM. If you page, you have to get the data FROM the SSD and put it INTO your RAM. From there, the RAM must be read again. So, even IF your SSD were exactly the same speed as your RAM, it will still be slower because it must be copied into RAM first before it can be used.
As to whether it is unreasonable, that depends. It will not cost much to try, but still a rather bad idea if you do a LOT of swapping.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
On the whole, OCZ has a 10% RMA rate while the industrial average was about 0.5% and Intel and Samsung where about 0.25%. You must feel lucky.
Funny you should mention that:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/once-great-ssd-manufacturer-ocz-filing-for-bankruptcy/