Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs 164
crookedvulture (1866146) writes "Last year, we kicked off an SSD endurance experiment to see how much data could be written to six consumer drives. One petabyte later, half of them are still going. Their performance hasn't really suffered, either. The casualties slowed down a little toward the very end, and they died in different ways. The Intel 335 Series and Kingston HyperX 3K provided plenty of warning of their imminent demise, though both still ended up completely unresponsive at the very end. The Samsung 840 Series, which uses more fragile TLC NAND, perished unexpectedly. It also suffered a rash of cell failures and multiple bouts of uncorrectable errors during its life. While the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, all six SSDs exceeded their rated lifespans by hundreds of terabytes. The fact that all of them wrote over 700TB is a testament to the endurance of modern SSDs."
Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
that reminds me ... I should do a backup ....
Re:And the winners are... (Score:5, Insightful)
IO pattern (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a heck of a lot of data, and certainly more than most folks will write in the lifetimes of their drives.
Continued write cycling [...]
That's just ridiculous. Since when the reliability is measured in how many petabytes can be written?
Spinning disks can be forced into inefficient patterns, speeding up the wear on mechanics.
SSDs can be easily forced to do a whole erase/write cycle just by writing single bytes into the wrong sector.
There is no need to waste bus bandwidth with a petabyte of data.
The problem was never the amount of the information.
The problem was always the IO pattern which might accelerate the wear of the the media.