6 ms·

because not losing data is infinitely better than saving your ssd life a couple years. we've had ssds for a long time now. still waiting for one to die on me. m

by gcb0 10y ago

because not losing data is infinitely better than saving your ssd life a couple years. we've had ssds for a long time now. still waiting for one to die on me. meanwhile I'm on my 27th dead spinning disk.

Reason077 10y ago
Some people are unjustifiably worried about SSD endurance. The reality is that even with fairly heavy use, most of them will far outlive the computers they're in. And their owners for that matter! I purchased my current SSD in March 2015 - it's a Samsung 850 EVO 512GB. It's done 7332 Power_On_Hours, and 36486573259 Total_LBAs_Written, which works out as just under 17 TB written, or about 31.6 GB/day. That kind of sounds like a lot. But let's put it in context. Even the previous generation of TLC NAND SSDs were recorded in endurance tests doing around 1 PETABYTE of writes before failing. The 850 EVO, with it's 3D V-NAND, should be capable of at least double that. For arguments sake, lets assume it will last for 1 Petabyte. I've written 17TB in 1.5 years, or 11.3TB per year. At that rate, this drive is still going to last at least another 90 YEARS. So is this really something to obsess over?
- Retra 10y ago
  >The reality is that even with fairly heavy use, most of them will far outlive the computers they're in. I'm not sure what the lifetime of a computer is. In my family, we are still occasionally running machines from circa 1995. They work fine. When should I stop using my MacBook? The only reason I'd stop is if it died in a way that can't be cheaply fixed.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    >I'm not sure what the lifetime of a computer is. In my family, we are still occasionally running machines from circa 1995. Pretty sure it's not 21 years, c'mon...
    - retro64 10y ago
      1995 is a stretch for anything modern but I have kids playing Minecraft on Pentium 4’s (with decent graphic cards though - that is the critical part). These boxes would have been new around 2003 or so.
  - dTal 10y ago
    I'm curious what useful work such a computer can perform, given that a typical 1995 computer had a 33 MHz processor, 8 megs of RAM and 1 gigabyte of hard disk space.
    - Retra 10y ago
      The same work they did in 1995. Word processing, games, internet. Computers weren't useless back then.
- acqq 10y ago
  The warranty on your EVO is just 150 TBW. The older generations typically had better endurance, the newer generations are more dense (cheaper to produce) but less durable. If you keep with 17 TB per one and half year your SSD should be OK for your for at least next 11 years.
  - Reason077 10y ago
    The warranty on your EVO is just 150 TBW. Yes, but endurance tests almost invariably show that the warranty ratings are extremely conservative. The 1TB 850 PRO (which uses exactly the same NAND chips as the 850 EVO, just a different controller) has been endurance tested to more than 7 Petabytes. See: http://packet.company/blog/ http://packet.company/blog/ The older generations typically had better endurance, the newer generations are more dense (cheaper to produce) but less durable. That was true when comparing MLC flash to TLC. But the 850 EVO and PRO use 3D V-NAND, which has significantly more endurance than previous-generation TLC. This seems to be confirmed by endurance tests. your SSD should be OK for your for at least next 11 years The warranty runs out after 5 years, anyway. But that does not mean it will suddenly stop working on that date!
    - alexhawke 10y ago
      No, you're wrong. The 850 PRO uses MLC while the EVO uses TLC. But given that they're both constructed on Samsung's 3D-VNAND technology, their endurance is still much higher than the competitors out there.
      - acqq 10y ago
        > their endurance is still much higher It's not "much" higher, actually, 3D MLC as implemented by Samsung is just "up to twice" better than the planar MLC given the same die area and capacity: http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/v-nand/technology.html http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/v-nand/tec... "Samsung V-NAND provides up to twice the endurance of planar NAND." But if the size of the cell drops, the number of P/E cycles drops. Samsung's endurance declarations are real and to be believed, they initially used bigger cells than some of their other chips (or competitors), but Samsung engineers know what they do, that "some tests" achieved "much more" can be either an accident or due to the errors in the test methodology (and I very much suspect the later, because it also allows the accidents to be taken as the "success"). At the time these SSDs appeared, Samsung declared twice less TBW than they do now, so now the declared endurance is surely not too pessimistic, but based on the real knowledge of what's inside.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  this is an incorrect assumption http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim... Most of the SSD failed before a petabyte... and started encountering lots of errors before that (forget about the Samsung Pro series which is the only one that survived till its multi-petabyte end).
  - Reason077 10y ago
    Those were all ~250GB devices, however. Endurance increases with higher capcity. If a 250GB 840 EVO can get to 800TB without errors, then I'd expect a 500GB 850 EVO to reach 1 PB, easily. A 500GB 850 EVO has newer-generation, more durable NAND endurance and twice the capacity to work with.
ams6110 10y ago
I am one of those people who sets browser to dump all cookies, cache and and history upon closing, so I'm not really sure what data would be lost.
- andybak 10y ago
  Do you ever miss the upside of all that persistence? I find my history useful, I find continually re-logging in a pain (obviously excepting the kind of sites where I don't want my login to persist i.e. financial etc). However I also only close my browser once every couple of weeks as well. System updates etc.
- gcb0 10y ago
  that is the beauty of it. You can disable. Be glad you have firefox and not only IE or chrome (where you can't disable all the things) But for 99% of the users, they want it. Heck, anecdote for anecdote: the very first thing i do on new machines is to open up firefox, go to settings, set the browser to startup with my previous session's tabs.
javier2 10y ago
This is my experience too.

by gcb0 10y ago

Reason077 10y ago

Some people are unjustifiably worried about SSD endurance. The reality is that even with fairly heavy use, most of them will far outlive the computers they're in. And their owners for that matter! I purchased my current SSD in March 2015 - it's a Samsung 850 EVO 512GB. It's done 7332 Power_On_Hours, and 36486573259 Total_LBAs_Written, which works out as just under 17 TB written, or about 31.6 GB/day. That kind of sounds like a lot. But let's put it in context. Even the previous generation of TLC NAND SSDs were recorded in endurance tests doing around 1 PETABYTE of writes before failing. The 850 EVO, with it's 3D V-NAND, should be capable of at least double that. For arguments sake, lets assume it will last for 1 Petabyte. I've written 17TB in 1.5 years, or 11.3TB per year. At that rate, this drive is still going to last at least another 90 YEARS. So is this really something to obsess over?

Retra 10y ago
>The reality is that even with fairly heavy use, most of them will far outlive the computers they're in. I'm not sure what the lifetime of a computer is. In my family, we are still occasionally running machines from circa 1995. They work fine. When should I stop using my MacBook? The only reason I'd stop is if it died in a way that can't be cheaply fixed.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- EpicEng 10y ago
  >I'm not sure what the lifetime of a computer is. In my family, we are still occasionally running machines from circa 1995. Pretty sure it's not 21 years, c'mon...
  - retro64 10y ago
    1995 is a stretch for anything modern but I have kids playing Minecraft on Pentium 4’s (with decent graphic cards though - that is the critical part). These boxes would have been new around 2003 or so.
- dTal 10y ago
  I'm curious what useful work such a computer can perform, given that a typical 1995 computer had a 33 MHz processor, 8 megs of RAM and 1 gigabyte of hard disk space.
  - Retra 10y ago
    The same work they did in 1995. Word processing, games, internet. Computers weren't useless back then.
acqq 10y ago
The warranty on your EVO is just 150 TBW. The older generations typically had better endurance, the newer generations are more dense (cheaper to produce) but less durable. If you keep with 17 TB per one and half year your SSD should be OK for your for at least next 11 years.
- Reason077 10y ago
  The warranty on your EVO is just 150 TBW. Yes, but endurance tests almost invariably show that the warranty ratings are extremely conservative. The 1TB 850 PRO (which uses exactly the same NAND chips as the 850 EVO, just a different controller) has been endurance tested to more than 7 Petabytes. See: http://packet.company/blog/ http://packet.company/blog/ The older generations typically had better endurance, the newer generations are more dense (cheaper to produce) but less durable. That was true when comparing MLC flash to TLC. But the 850 EVO and PRO use 3D V-NAND, which has significantly more endurance than previous-generation TLC. This seems to be confirmed by endurance tests. your SSD should be OK for your for at least next 11 years The warranty runs out after 5 years, anyway. But that does not mean it will suddenly stop working on that date!
  - alexhawke 10y ago
    No, you're wrong. The 850 PRO uses MLC while the EVO uses TLC. But given that they're both constructed on Samsung's 3D-VNAND technology, their endurance is still much higher than the competitors out there.
    - acqq 10y ago
      > their endurance is still much higher It's not "much" higher, actually, 3D MLC as implemented by Samsung is just "up to twice" better than the planar MLC given the same die area and capacity: http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/v-nand/technology.html http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/v-nand/tec... "Samsung V-NAND provides up to twice the endurance of planar NAND." But if the size of the cell drops, the number of P/E cycles drops. Samsung's endurance declarations are real and to be believed, they initially used bigger cells than some of their other chips (or competitors), but Samsung engineers know what they do, that "some tests" achieved "much more" can be either an accident or due to the errors in the test methodology (and I very much suspect the later, because it also allows the accidents to be taken as the "success"). At the time these SSDs appeared, Samsung declared twice less TBW than they do now, so now the declared endurance is surely not too pessimistic, but based on the real knowledge of what's inside.
sandGorgon 10y ago
this is an incorrect assumption http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim... Most of the SSD failed before a petabyte... and started encountering lots of errors before that (forget about the Samsung Pro series which is the only one that survived till its multi-petabyte end).
- Reason077 10y ago
  Those were all ~250GB devices, however. Endurance increases with higher capcity. If a 250GB 840 EVO can get to 800TB without errors, then I'd expect a 500GB 850 EVO to reach 1 PB, easily. A 500GB 850 EVO has newer-generation, more durable NAND endurance and twice the capacity to work with.

ams6110 10y ago

I am one of those people who sets browser to dump all cookies, cache and and history upon closing, so I'm not really sure what data would be lost.

andybak 10y ago
Do you ever miss the upside of all that persistence? I find my history useful, I find continually re-logging in a pain (obviously excepting the kind of sites where I don't want my login to persist i.e. financial etc). However I also only close my browser once every couple of weeks as well. System updates etc.
gcb0 10y ago
that is the beauty of it. You can disable. Be glad you have firefox and not only IE or chrome (where you can't disable all the things) But for 99% of the users, they want it. Heck, anecdote for anecdote: the very first thing i do on new machines is to open up firefox, go to settings, set the browser to startup with my previous session's tabs.

javier2 10y ago

This is my experience too.