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You should be aware that SSDs perform wear leveling, so the key metric is not how many program/erase cycles the underlying flash can handle on a per-block basis
by wtallis 5y ago
You should be aware that SSDs perform wear leveling, so the key metric is not how many program/erase cycles the underlying flash can handle on a per-block basis, but the total amount of writes the drive can handle, usually expressed in TB or PB.
Unless you have measured your own workload in enough detail to know otherwise, it is extremely unlikely you actually need to use SLC NAND. The market has almost completely abandoned SLC NAND for good reason, and your use case probably isn't that special (though if it is, I'm sure we could have an interesting conversation about it). Absent clear evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that a modern TLC SSD could easily fulfill your actual write endurance and data retention requirements, because that's the conclusion that has been reached by all of the big corporations who have been using modern SSDs in production at scale.
- bullen 5y agoMaybe, but I'm factoring in the time spent on maintenance at 100x the cost because that is not something I want me or my kids to have to do ever! Meaning with 5 million customers on my MMO we have 250 years of all of them playing every day with these drives. Which gives us margin!
- gpapilion 5y agoThe wildcard here is the garbage collection in the drive, and bad firmware with high write amplification. I’ve seen TLC devices go bad within a year where the vendor optimized for full page P/E cycles. That said these were high transaction server workloads, and typical home use would be challenged to get to that kind of wear.