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"I'm sure they wear out quick with heavy writes." Do you have something to back that assertion up? Seriously, I'm interested, so if you have links to further i

"I'm sure they wear out quick with heavy writes." Do you have something to back that assertion up? Seriously, I'm interested, so if you have links to further information, I'm sure everyone would appreciate it.

jhallenworld 13y ago
Well here is one, but this is really for the device level: http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2012/talks/Tuesday/T04_Heidecker_Flash_Qualification.pdf http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2012/talks/Tuesday/T04_Hei... If I find a good system-level paper, I'll post it. Anyway, SSD drive wear tends to be rated like this: 5 years for x number of full drive writes per day. For good drives, x is 1. For really good SLC NAND based drives x could be as much as 10, but they are very expensive. For cheap consumer drives x could be 1/10. Based on vendor sales meetings, the aggressively large drives also have low write endurance (but then they say they are not optimized for heavy writes). Better drives should have a built-in write counter so you can track the remaining life. Another interesting parameter is their power-off "data retention" time. At end of life, this tends to be specified to be just 90 days.
tim333 13y ago
There seems a lot of contradictory data out there but Techreport did an experiment with 6 consumer grade 256GB drives endlessly reading and writing: http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endur... They were still going after 600TB of read writes though with some degradation: http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
- jhallenworld 13y ago
  Interesting, my one quibble is that I don't see anything about the temperature. Flash memory is very sensitive to it.

jhallenworld 13y ago

Well here is one, but this is really for the device level: http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2012/talks/Tuesday/T04_Heidecker_Flash_Qualification.pdf http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2012/talks/Tuesday/T04_Hei... If I find a good system-level paper, I'll post it. Anyway, SSD drive wear tends to be rated like this: 5 years for x number of full drive writes per day. For good drives, x is 1. For really good SLC NAND based drives x could be as much as 10, but they are very expensive. For cheap consumer drives x could be 1/10. Based on vendor sales meetings, the aggressively large drives also have low write endurance (but then they say they are not optimized for heavy writes). Better drives should have a built-in write counter so you can track the remaining life. Another interesting parameter is their power-off "data retention" time. At end of life, this tends to be specified to be just 90 days.

tim333 13y ago

There seems a lot of contradictory data out there but Techreport did an experiment with 6 consumer grade 256GB drives endlessly reading and writing: http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endur... They were still going after 600TB of read writes though with some degradation: http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

jhallenworld 13y ago
Interesting, my one quibble is that I don't see anything about the temperature. Flash memory is very sensitive to it.