SSD life span

HavocXphere

New member
Found a nice article on SSDs being pushed to the limit. They're doing 1PB of writes (1000 terabytes) and looking at when / how things break.

Most drives seem to die at the 700TB+ mark. For reference...my OCZ Vertex 4 has just under 4TB of writes on it after like 2 years of decent use.

Looking at that I'm inclined to think that MTBF is a waste of time for SSDs...either it lasts forever or it gets nailed by a fluke...and stats like MTBF won't account for flukes imo.

Also impressed with how predictably the drives died. e.g. The intel 335 remaining useful life SMART data was clearly & steadily heading towards 700TB...and then it died just after that.
 
I had a Corsair 120gig SSD in my laptop that lasted just over a year...

I was told the performance increase would be incredible, and dont get me wrong it was, but i wasnt ever told about the read write life span of an SSD... I do 3D rendering for a living, and even with my render farm doing the bulk of the rendering work, the amount of punishment that drive took over the space of the 14 months it was around must have been immense...

Still though if someone told me it would only last that long I would never have sunk the cash into it...
 
I had a Corsair 120gig SSD in my laptop that lasted just over a year...

I was told the performance increase would be incredible, and dont get me wrong it was, but i wasnt ever told about the read write life span of an SSD... I do 3D rendering for a living, and even with my render farm doing the bulk of the rendering work, the amount of punishment that drive took over the space of the 14 months it was around must have been immense...

Still though if someone told me it would only last that long I would never have sunk the cash into it...
I doubt that was because of flash wear, the controller probably died which is by far the most common cause of SSD failure.

If that was the case you could have gotten it covered by the warranty.
 
Sticking a consumer level device in a render farm was never going to end well anyway...

14 months of hard use on a consumer level device seems decent enough though. A render farm is likely to write 24/7 while a consumer PC is not.
 
Also impressed with how predictably the drives died. e.g. The intel 335 remaining useful life SMART data was clearly & steadily heading towards 700TB...and then it died just after that.

Intel's testing regimen is more insane than Samsung's. They actually put their drives next to MRI machines to see what magnetic forces do to the controller, or they put SSDs in a particle collider to see what happens and how the flash and controller account for bit-flips. They even freeze them to subsero temperatures to see how the electrons react and figure out how they can extract more efficiency from flash memory. SSDs passed the reliability stats of hard drives long ago.

The failure of the 840 Evo was expected, but I never thought TLC flash would last that long.

With the data as TR presented it, there's a really startling idea coming to the fore - so long as the SSD you've purchases does not have any issues with voltage, manufacturing defects, faulty controllers or firmware or physical damage, it will outlive you if you're just using it in a home PC kind of role.
 
I purchased a Samsung 250gb SSD almost 2 years ago. I have this hard drive on my daily laptop which is used for work so basically constantly in use even some weekends when setting up clients infrastructures and I must admit that it did not skip a beat yet. I tend to copy large files (Software etc) to and from the drive on a daily basis.

I did find the SSD drives work best on windows 8.1 and when I turn virtual caching off. Then I feel you get the true performance of the drive.

That's just my opinion and experience.
 
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