The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're All Dead

[YeuEmMaiMai]

 

[AlienTech]

That's a good point, though the size of the SSD is likely a factor here too; the 840 Pro that Tech Report looked at was 256GB, whereas the 850 Pro I'm testing is 1TB. That might suggest that the 840 actually did slightly better than the 850, though both did brilliantly.

The 850 Pro endurance test has reached 3PB written now, with just under 800 sectors reallocated. I'm powering it off for a week as a short retention test, and will then set the normal testing going again.

I was reading the data sheet from crucial and they have endurance of 75TB of data written. So its 75TB for all capacities.. But it seems with larger capacities, the actual data thats changed on the drive goes up exponentially. Hence more capacity shows higher speeds but not necessarily higher endurance. They also say use 16GB block writes for efficiency and page erase size has no bearing on anything. So alignment is a non issue for new SSD's as long as they stick to those 16KB boundaries. The endurance difference between the 840 and 850 might be due to the use of 3D nand instead. Also I highly doubt a few weeks will show problems with data retention.. We have flash bios that last decades. Those are also nand flash chips. We use PROM chips for extremely long term data retention until nand flash became cheaper than burn once.

 

[leeleatherwood]

I'm close to tossing in the towel as well. Mine is giving me grief now after only a few months. Fuk it. I don't experience any performance gain over my Barracuda other than startup times. I'm going back to the old standard. SSD's so long...hardly knew ya.

LOL

 

[evilsofa]

The endurance difference between the 840 and 850 might be due to the use of 3D nand instead.

Yes, in that the 850 line's 3D NAND allowed them to use 40nm process instead of the 840 line's 21nm process. The smaller the process, the lower the endurance.