The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte


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I feel for the subjects of our SSD Endurance Experiment. They didn't volunteer for this life. These consumer-grade drives could have ended up in a corporate desktop or grandma's laptop or even an enthusiast's PC. They could have spent their days saving spreadsheets and caching Internet files and occasionally making space for new Steam downloads. Instead, they ended up in our labs, on the receiving end of a torturous torrent of writes designed to kill them.

Talk about a rough life.

 

We started with six SSDs: the Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, Intel 335 Series 240GB, Samsung 840 Series 250GB, Samsung 840 Pro 256GB, and two Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB. They all exceeded their endurance specifications early on, successfully writing hundreds of terabytes without issue. That's a heck of a lot of data, and certainly more than most folks will write in the lifetimes of their drives.

 

The last time we checked in, the SSDs had just passed the 600TB mark. They were all functional, but the 840 Series was burning through its TLC cells at a steady pace, and even some of the MLC drives were starting to show cracks. We've now written over a petabyte, and only half of the SSDs remain. Three drives failed at different points?and in different ways?before reaching the 1PB milestone.

 

We've performed autopsies on the casualties and our usual battery of tests on the survivors, and there is much to report.

 

 

I posted this in the hardware hangout seeing how people in this forum would be the most interested in these SSD 1PB stress test. It was quite an interesting read.

 

http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

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okay it's saturday and i'm still half asleep. So i might be missing something.

 

600TB = 614400GB.

 

It means that you must empty and fill a 240GB drive 2560 to achieve this amount of data. That's 256 times every years for 10 years. Almost once every day.

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Personally apart from a premature failure it does make you feel good about SSD reliability.

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Want to really determine it's life?  Hit it with a sledgehammer. <s>

 

These tests like many others don't imitate real life situations.

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Want to really determine it's life?  Hit it with a sledgehammer. <s>

 

These tests like many others don't imitate real life situations.

 

correct. They are way better than real life.

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Want to really determine it's life?  Hit it with a sledgehammer. <s>

 

These tests like many others don't imitate real life situations.

 

In real life you beat your drives with a hammer!?  :wacko:

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after reading the article... in short, the SSD's they tested had a lifespan WAY longer then what they are rated at and most people won't come close to writing that amount of data to them before they move onto something bigger/better. so that looks good for SSD reliability.

 

they tried to write 1PB (i.e. 1000TB of writes) and some exceeded this. so even conservatively you can probably easily achieve 400-500TB+ of writes. also, it appears all drives give you ample warning before they actually do fail and given how much data they wrote to the drive if you first start seeing warnings chances are there is still a lot of life left in them in real world use since they where basically running tests on the drive in 100TB intervals to check the health of them etc.

 

p.s. i still have yet to move to a SSD drive though myself since i tend to favor storage space over speed but i suspect eventually ill get a SSD just to get a solid performance boost to my overall system. but i figure as a general rule i won't want anything smaller than around 250GB as that way i can install windows to it and have ample room for installing some games.

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p.s. i still have yet to move to a SSD drive though myself since i tend to favor storage space over speed but i suspect eventually ill get a SSD just to get a solid performance boost to my overall system. but i figure as a general rule i won't want anything smaller than around 250GB as that way i can install windows to it and have ample room for installing some games.

 

U better get on that!

 

man, I don't know how many SSD's I have ...maybe ...18?

 

There is not a single computer I have that doesn't have an ssd in it as the boot drive.

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U better get on that!

 

man, I don't know how many SSD's I have ...maybe ...18?

 

There is not a single computer I have that doesn't have an ssd in it as the boot drive.

 

 

in your experience are SSD pretty reliable? ; i ask because you said you got roughly 18 of them.

 

because in my current setup if i did get a SSD drive i would have to dump one of my SATA hard drives or DVD burners pretty much as i got four SATA ports on motherboard and two in a add on device (so 6 SATA ports total) and everything is used up. but two of the SATA's are DVD Burners so if i really had to i could disconnect one of those.

 

but in the end ill probably wait a while til prices come down as just taking a quick look at one of the drives in the articles test, Samsung 840 series, that's currently $142 out-the-door on newegg. which while not bad is a tad steep especially considering it's only 250GB as for $142 i could get a ton more space from a regular hard drive (i.e. 3-4TB hard drive) and then retire (or maybe move to external storage) some of my current in use drives like 250GB/400GB. that 250GB one is from March 2006 and still going.

 

but with all of that said... when i do decide to get into SSD i am definitely going to do some research into them to find a solid performer for a reasonable price. basically the good bang-for-the-buck ones.

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No love for Intel 730 or DC series? I had hoped to see if it's worth the premium in terms of endurance.

 

Unless you are running a server the answer is no. Specially in canada where the difference in price is ridiculous.

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So, for the Intel drive, once it is in read only mode, how do you recover data?

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So, for the Intel drive, once it is in read only mode, how do you recover data?

 

You just restore from your backups :laugh: :) ;)

 

Didn't go back and read it but if by read only and if it showed up my guess is you could boot off a bartpe disc and get the data off.

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Hardware.Info tests lifespan of Samsung SSD 840 250GB TLC SSD [updated with final conclusion]

 

Long story short: with adequate care and regular usage patterns, they'll outlive any PC they're put in with ease.

 

 

that's always good to hear and reading that article what you said is the bottom line.

 

but i wonder if those figures are a good ball park estimate with ANY SSD's in general? ; as while they only had 2 Samsung drives, which is not really enough to see how consistent they are over say 1,000 drives or something like that, i would have to assume most SSD's should comfortably exceed there guaranteed lifespan. because according to the article even if you wrote say 30GB a day to them it's going to EASILY outlast many PC's you build as say even if you don't build PC's often, say once between every 5-10 years, that should easily make it that far given the data they have here and probably quite a bit beyond that.

 

because while you can see the results in the topic it appears the drives vary some but i figure if what's shown in this topic is a good ball park indication for SSD drives as a whole that means they are quite reliable ;)

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Considering how much I'm burning through my SSD at home, I'm genuinely concerned - still.

 

 

hell, i would not be worried unless you are going crazy with writing A LOT of data to it on a constant basis.

 

even based on their 30GB of written data to it per day average, given their couple of drives, that's still roughly 23-25 years of use. but they did say it's hard to tell if all of those Samsung drives behave that way as they don't have a large enough sample size to see the consistency between drives as some drives could have noticeably less life, in terms of written data, than the two in their testing did as just on the two they did it was 707TB and the other was 745TB before they started to go into their reserve memory (i.e. basically the drives are still fully functional but that's the early signs of failure basically). those drives worked fine until 764TB and 768TB marks when data corruption set in. so in other words... by the time your drive shifts to it's reserve memory you still have ample time (probably plenty of time especially if you are more of a average user) to backup the drives before the data corruption sets in.

 

so in other words unless you are constantly hammering the drive with data writing (and large amount of it at that) chances are you will EASILY get 5-10+ years out of it according to that articles statistics and that's being conservative to. but i guess you never know though as some drives might be faulty i suspect like just about all electronics that fail much earlier than they should (i never really looked into SSD drive failure rates but i would assume they are noticeably more reliable then regular hard drives?). but for the most part i would be confident in those Samsung drives in their test to say the least.

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What about the SSD's Apple use on their Airs? Supposedly these things last even longer.

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What about the SSD's Apple use on their Airs? Supposedly these things last even longer.

If I remember correctly they use samsung ssd's in their latest macbooks with a PCIe interface(faster then sata interface), not exactly sure if they also use other brands.

 

So I don't think that it makes a difference if you got a apple device or not :p

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hell, i would not be worried unless you are going crazy with writing A LOT of data to it on a constant basis.

Which I do. I've not had it for a year and it's already written a few TB of data. And I've been really careful about storing stuff OFF the SDD... :/

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Which I do. I've not had it for a year and it's already written a few TB of data. And I've been really careful about storing stuff OFF the SDD... :/

 

look at it this way... say you do 4TB of writes per year that calculates out to about 11GB per day average and their test was based around that basically. so i don't think you got to worry much as you ain't really taxing it all that much when you look at the average GB per day over this first year.

 

so in other words... if your drive lasts anything close to what those tests show that SSD drive of yours is not dying anytime soon ;)

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so in other words... if your drive lasts anything close to what those tests show that SSD drive of yours is not dying anytime soon ;)

Well I hope not, it didn't come cheap, and neither are replacements! :P

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