Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs

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

[ShanghaiBill]

has anyone tried this with platter drives?

A few years ago, Google published a study [googleusercontent.com] of hard disk failures. Failures were not correlated with how much data was written or read. Failures were correlated with the amount of time the disk was spun up, so you should idle a drive not in active use. Failures were negatively correlated with temperature: drives kept cooler were MORE likely to fail.

Re:And the winners are...

[jcochran]

You might want to do a bit of math before making such a statement. 700TB is a very large amount of data. And in order to do that in a week, would require quite a bit of data transfer bandwidth. To wit:

700,000,000,000,000 / 7 days = 100,000,000,000,000 / 24 hours = 4,166,666,666,666 / 3600 seconds = 1,157,407,407 bytes per second.

Do you really write 1.157GB/second every second for a week? And if so, what data interface are you using? I'd really like to know since SATA 3.0 can only handle 600MB/second. Perhaps you're using SATA 3.2 which does have the required speed?

Now in an environment using multiple drives, you can get to the 700TB mark much more rapidly with much lower per drive bandwidth. But then again, that's not the test criteria. They are testing how much endurance individual SSDs have.

Re:context

[viperidaenz]

While ShanghaiBill apparently struggles with the English language, the phase "you should idle a drive not in active use" means the drive will spin up fewer times. You should disable spin down and leave the drive idling, not on standby.
You'll reduce the number of head load/unloads.
You'll reduce peak current consumption of the spindle motor.
The drive will stay at a more stable temperature.

extremesystems test

[0111 1110]

There was also a very interesting endurance test [xtremesystems.org] done on extremesystems.org. Very impressive stuff. I don't yet own an SSD, but I'll continue to consider buying one! Maybe next Black Friday. Just waiting for the right deal.

Re:context

[LordLimecat]

Tape actually has pretty high transfer rates. Its seek times are what sucks, but if you're doing a dump of tape you arent doing any seeking at all.

Re:context

[timeOday]

But contiguous writes is the absolute (and unrealistic) best case in terms of MB transferred before failure for an HDD, because it minimizes the number of revolutions and seeks per megabyte written. For whatever it's worth, it used to be said that "enterprise grade" drives were designed to withstand constant seeking associated with accesses from multiple processes, instead of fewer seeks associated with sporadic, single-user access.

If seeking does wear a drive, then using an SSD for files that generates lots of seeks will not only greatly speed up the computer, but also extend the life of HDDs relegated to storing big files.