Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
OCZ? Well there's your problem.
Funny you should mention that:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/once-great-ssd-manufacturer-ocz-filing-for-bankruptcy/