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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.
Being an AC, I would chalk this up to a joke or trolling. But.... on the off chance that you are serious, I will bite.
Yes, you COULD use an SSD as swap, but it will not help THAT much. An SSD is much faster than a mechanical disk, but still a couple of orders of magnitude slower than real RAM. That upgrade would be like the difference between jogging with 50 pounds on your back, and then lowering it to 35 pounds. Yes, it will make a difference and make things better, but how much better to have no weight at all?
Just get more RAM. If your system cannot hold more RAM, then get a new mobo. If you regularly go over 16 GB of actual RAM in use, even going to a slower processor will be an improvement if you stop swapping. Hitting the swap file is a great way to make a fast processor do nothing for a while.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Talk about your planned obsolescence - not a single sector reallocation registered, but the firmware counter says it's write-tolerance is reached so it kills itself. I suppose it's nice that it switches to read-only mode when it dies, except for the fact that it bricks itself entirely after a power cycle. I mean come on - if it's my OS and/or paging drive then switching to read-only mode is going to kill the OS almost immediately, and there goes my one chance at data recovery. Why not just leave it in permanent read-only mode instead? Sure it's useless for most applications, but at least I can recover my data at my leisure.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What pisses me off is that the Intel drive suicided. OK, I can understand that they track writes and shut it down once confidence goes down. I get that. However, the drive should be read-only after that!
If I had a drive that still held my perfect, pristine data, but I could not actually get to it, I would be pissed. What is wrong with going into a read-only mode?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Who thought this was a good idea? If the drive thinks future writes are unstable, good for it to go into read only mode. But to then commit suicide on the next reboot? What if I want to take one final backup, and I lose power?
I haven't gone back to SSDs on my desktop since I tried one from OCZ. The damn thing would work fine for a bit, but then randomly freeze my entire computer until I powered it off.
PS: You DO have backups.... right?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
OCZ? Well there's your problem.
No, what the Intel drive did was the /most/ correct out of all of the drives.
It's a clearly defined failure mode, and it failed predictably and exactly as documented. When your failure modes are known and fail reliably, it's your fault for not safeguarding data. (Backups)
I agree that it would have probably been a good idea to solider on in read-only mode but I'm guessing that Intel decided that data integrity could not be guaranteed. The only thing worse than losing all of your data is having your data in an unknown/inconsistent tate.
Conventional HDDs (and other magnetic storage) can suffer from random loss of magnetization. Any permanent magnet will slowly weaken over time, and the nature of magnetic media - especially high density - means neighboring domains can alter a weakened bit more easily.
The solution in both cases: Rewrite the data periodically to keep it "fresh" and include error correction to help mitigate minor losses.
=Smidge=
I think better backup strategies apply here. If someone steals your computer you got just as much warning as the SSD drive. Just saying.