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:context (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that much higher for streaming reads and writes, the new Seagate 6TB can do 220MB/s @128KB [storagereview.com] streaming reads or writes. That works out to ~19TB/day so it would only take around 2 months to hit 1PB.
Re:context (Score:5, Interesting)
That's curious. Almost all of the drive failures I've seen can be attributed to head damage from repeated parking prior to spin-down, whereas all the drives that I've kept spinning continuously have kept working essentially forever. And drives left spun down too long had a tendency to refuse to spin up.
I've had exactly one drive that had problems from spinning too much, and that was just an acoustic failure (I had the drive replaced because it was too darn noisy). With that said, that was an older, pre-fluid-bearing drive. I've never experienced even a partial bearing failure with newer drives.
It seems odd that their conclusions recommended precisely the opposite of what I've seen work in practice. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that my sample size is much smaller than Google's sample size, so it is possible that the failures I've seen are a fluke, but the differences are so striking that it leads me to suspect other differences. For example, Google might be using enterprise-class drives that lack a park ramp....