The SSD Endurance Experiment: Two freaking petabytes

It's very interesting to see how different SSDs fail.

Intel took the most conservative approach, repeatedly warning the user that the SSD's lifetime is finished before gracefully entering read-only mode, allowing the user to recover all data, and preventing the user from going beyond that into territory where the drive might start encountering unrecoverable errors. The end result is that the Intel SSD did not fail, violating the maxim that "all drives fail eventually".

So far, the other drives that have failed in the study failed in ways that left the user unable to recover data, some of them after suffering unrecoverable errors. I'll grant they do so at levels that individual users will never ordinarily reach - writing that much data is definitely server behavior.
 
DDR3 memory DIMMs don't wear out, why can't they come up with SSDs as durable?

When I'm traveling I boot Linux off USB flash drives (the good stuff UHS-1) and I've never had one fail, so screw $500 SSDs.
 
reb00tin said:
DDR3 memory DIMMs don't wear out, why can't they come up with SSDs as durable?

When I'm traveling I boot Linux off USB flash drives (the good stuff UHS-1) and I've never had one fail, so screw $500 SSDs.
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Because when u write something your causing physical damage to the drive and after a while the damage is to great, DDR on the other hand just hold electrons. They are no where near same technologies. Carbon nanotubes might get us no volatil ram someday that might extend into hard drives and your flash drive will break eventually after so many writes ssds are flash drives
 
reb00tin said:
DDR3 memory DIMMs don't wear out, why can't they come up with SSDs as durable?
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Do DDR3 memory DIMMs retain data without power? No? Maybe that might have something to do with it.

When I'm traveling I boot Linux off USB flash drives (the good stuff UHS-1) and I've never had one fail, so screw $500 SSDs.
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Do they compete on capacity or performance? All I find in UHS-1 is card readers up to 64GB, which doesn't seem to be what you're talking about, because I don't believe you could be serious about comparing 64GB data storage to 1TB data storage.
 
reb00tin said:
DDR3 memory DIMMs don't wear out, why can't they come up with SSDs as durable?
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SDRAM has a failure rate like all other semiconductor devices. Arguably, you can say SLC NAND flash is pretty damn reliable from those tests. Those are only consumer level drives and all lasted past several decades of beyond normal usage*. They would be uselessly small storage toys before wearing out write cycles for almost all PC users.

* I make no attempt to minimize usage of my TLC 840 non-pro SSD (in a main laptop used for work and other things), and I've barely reached 7TB written after 22 months. With the wear leveling rate it's burning through, it won't reach bottom for 70+ more years and won't reach conditions which caused failure in the TR testing for about 250 years. Obviously other parts of the flash or controller could fail for other reasons, but the reliability of flash cells itself is pretty solid.
 
Neat, I was worried my 840 Pro might have excessive wear due to a report it was running out of writes.
Damned if I can find what program said it though after re-installing Windows.
I'm only at 2.82TB so chances are its good for a loooong time.
 
Interesting. I also failed to kill a Samsung 840 when I went for a deliberate kill. First SSD to do so.

Maybe they have a HD inside :)
 
evilsofa said:
Do they compete on capacity or performance? All I find in UHS-1 is card readers up to 64GB, which doesn't seem to be what you're talking about, because I don't believe you could be serious about comparing 64GB data storage to 1TB data storage.
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I’m comparing its usefulness to the user. Linux cheerfully installs on any media, so I can boot off any machine with a USB port, that way I don’t have to carry a computer. Portability and security. Ultimately, with a lightweight Linux like Android I could boot off any tablet.

I use 32 GB UHS-1, $20, ~75 MB/sec, feels just like a HD, will even run VMs, and I can easily clone them as a backup in case of failure. I don’t use them every day, only when I travel, so not sure about durability, but I’m guessing it’s the same flash technology as SSDs.
 
reb00tin said:
I’m comparing its usefulness to the user. Linux cheerfully installs on any media, so I can boot off any machine with a USB port, that way I don’t have to carry a computer. Portability and security. Ultimately, with a lightweight Linux like Android I could boot off any tablet.

I use 32 GB UHS-1, $20, ~75 MB/sec, feels just like a HD, will even run VMs, and I can easily clone them as a backup in case of failure. I don’t use them every day, only when I travel, so not sure about durability, but I’m guessing it’s the same flash technology as SSDs.
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75MB/sec is NOTHING compared to a SSD. Good SSDs exceed that by orders of magnitude. The 840 EVO in my desktop benchmarks around 450-500MB/sec. They get much faster when you get into the PCIe ones.

The fastest UHS-1 MicroSD cards clock in at 90MB/sec.
 
but I’m guessing it’s the same flash technology as SSDs
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Not always on USB sticks you will see more TLC and even QLC and certainly not as good wear levelling as a SSD.
 
but USB keys tend to live through washing machines and driers... someone test an SSD?
 
That makes me happy.
Only 3TB written in 2 years lol.
 
My main gaming PC has an Intel 335, which happens to be one of the SSDs in this test - the one that retired itself gracefully when Intel said it would. I've had it for three years now and the SMART Media Wearout Indicator is still at 100%. I have not yet used 1% of the writes this SSD is rated for, and I even have the Windows 7 swap file on it.
 
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