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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.
Within a year, but not from the memory, but a shit controller. From OCZ iirc. Something about it getting past half full giving it bad performance and anything before a full, drawn out format didn't cut it.
Since then, no SSDs died. But a fair number of spinning disks.
I think all most people are waiting for is for the GB/$ gap to decrease markedly. Otherwise it stays a SSD for your boot drive, a spinning disk to archive your junk market.
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.
As SSD cells wear, the problem is that they hold charge for less time. Starting new, the time that the charge will be held would be years, but as the SSD wears, the endurance of the held charge declines.
Consequently, continuous write tests will continue to report "all good" with a drive that is useless in practice, because while the continuous write will re-write a particular cell once every few hours, it might only hold a charge for a few days - meaning if you turned it off for even a day or so, you'd suffer serious data loss.
SSDs are amazing but you definitely can't carry conventional wisdom from HDDs over.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'm actually not convinced it's a terrible idea. It seems to me that when swapping really gets slow, its because of thrashing the hard disk. SSD may be several orders of magnitude slower than memory, but it's also several orders of magnitude faster than a thrashing HDD. It seems like it might be a reasonable tradeoff to make. New memory might require a new motherboard (and maybe a new processor), costing several hundred dollars, a not-insignificant amount of effort to swap it out, possibilities of new bugs with hardware incompatabilities, etc...all for some additional memory with, 99% of the, probably serves no additional benefit. On the other hand, it takes no more than a few minutes to move your swap between drives, costs nothing, and has almost no risk of any incompatibilities (unless you start ending up with applications fighting for throughput under the additional load).