3 ms·
My impression was that SSDs would eventually become unwritable, but that they never become unreadable. Part of that understanding comes from an anecdote relate
by codewright 14y ago
My impression was that SSDs would eventually become unwritable, but that they never become unreadable.
Part of that understanding comes from an anecdote related by a contractor I knew that did government work. Supposedly some departments will use solid-state disks for the "cannot lose" data for which availability is less important because the disks will eventually become unwritable and at that point just become archives.
- asjo 14y agoMy first (Intel X-25) SSD went from working fine to not being able to read _anything_ from it, at all, in 10 minutes - after having worked great for 1½ years. It is still worth it, but I have never experienced a failure mode like that with harddisks. Usually you can get most of the data off of them when you start getting errors.
- jasomill 14y agoFlash, by design, only admits finitely many write cycles, but this does not mean SSDs "never become unreadable", only that they never become unreadable as a result of the finite rewritability of Flash. In theory. In practice, the fact that your data is "really still there" means very little if the controller refuses to read it, SSD firmware is complex and therefore bug-prone, and reading in the "worn out" state will always be a rare edge case, so it's not something I'd care to test without good, current backups.