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The SSD Endurance Experiment: Only Two Remain After 1.5PB
- kalleboo 12y agoI'm happy to see the high write longevity these drives are achieving, but it frightens me a lot that it seems like the fail-safes where they're designed to go into read-only mode instead of just dropping off the controller and losing your data are failing on all of them, even the Intel!
- cesarb 12y agoIn my experience with traditional HDDs, they often drop off the controller and lose your data when they fail. Which means that, at least, SSDs are not worse than HDDs in that regard. And they have the potential for a softer failure mode (going read-only).
- devindotcom 12y agoI kind of anthropomorphize the devices in tests like this, so it's a bit sad to see the poor things made to run until their legs fall off. But it's nice to know they run farther than expected.
- Scuds 12y agorunning a defragment operation on a few of these makes them emit some electronic noise if you listen closely. :D
- darkstar999 12y agoFor real though, don't defrag an SSD. It's pointless and wears it out for no reason.
- dghughes 12y agoThe old Windows defrag with the small blocks was like visual bubblewrap. We need more system utilities that are fun to watch.
- reitzensteinm 12y agoI agree that it's not a good idea to defrag an SSD. But I'd like to nitpick your assertion that there is no reason. Even on excellent drives, 4k random reads/writes are not as fast as sequential. For example, the SSD in my machine, a 120gb Intel 330 series, can do ~88 MB/s of random 4k reads, but 500 MB/s of sequential, a multiple of ~6x. Now, a Seagate 5 TB drive will do 146 MB/s of sequential reads and ~470 kB/s of random access, a difference of ~310x, so SSDs are punished for poor access patterns significantly less. But it's probably possible to manufacture a situation where defrag would indeed give significant benefits. Whether it's ever seen in the real world is another story. [1] http://ark.intel.com/products/67287/Intel-SSD-330-Series-120GB-SATA-6Gbs-25nm-MLC http://ark.intel.com/products/67287/Intel-SSD-330-Series-120... [2] http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/desktop-hdd-fam/en-us/docs/desktop-hdd-ds1770-4-1405us.pdf http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/desktop-h...
- noselasd 12y agoRandom reads are still significantly slower than sequential reads on most SSDs.
- Retric 12y agoI normally find it annoying when they run endurance tests like this using only one drive of each brand and treat the results as particularly meaningful. However, in this case I think the failures may suggest things about the drives underlying architecture not just who picked the best sample from the bin.
- Mithaldu 12y agoGiven that return rates for these drives can go up to 2.5% even under normal usage conditions (though granted, that was OCZ), it's really quite meaningless to do this kind of test without having a whole batch of drives for each type.
- simoncion 12y agoTwo words: IBM Deathstar.
- pyre 12y agoWhat does that have to do with commentary on needing to have larger cross-batch samples?
- vidarh 12y agoWhen bringing up OCZ' notorious high return rate, and using that to indicate a high failure rate for SSD's, bringing up the IBM DeathStar is a very relevant counterpoint. Larger cross-batch samples is absolutely a good idea, but the dig at SSD's applies just as much to regular harddrives. [For those who don't know, DeathStar was a nickname given to the IBM DeskStar line of harddrives after one of the models had a problem that gave them high odds of catastrophic head crashes - so bad in fact that they'd strip most of the magnetic material off the glass platters when they crashed[1] -; out of 10 IBM DeskStar drives we had at the time, all 10 failed within a week or two of each other, under a year after we bought them. The problem was is often considered to be one of the main reasons why IBM unloaded their hard drive business to Hitachi] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#mediaviewer/File:IBM75GXP_Failed_Disks.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#mediaviewer/File:...
- Aoyagi 12y agoI wish the number of samples was much, much higher...
- CPAhem 12y agoYes and that SSDs had also been compared to normal spinning hard drives, too.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoHere's somebody else's data: http://www.overclock.net/t/1284055/ssd-return-rates http://www.overclock.net/t/1284055/ssd-return-rates
- gonzo 12y ago2012
- scrollaway 12y agoIt'd be nice to get some endurance testing on the sandisk internal solid state drives (eg. http://www.amazon.com/Sandisk-SDSA5JK-064G-Module-Laptop-Netobook/dp/B00IWNYRQ0 http://www.amazon.com/Sandisk-SDSA5JK-064G-Module-Laptop-Net...) I've had one fail three days ago on a laptop that was barely a year old. I'm not even sure what actually failed - debugging a broken ssd is a pain, and when I mount it it just freezes for ages, making the matter worse. Sandisk being the only real seller of those things there isn't exactly a lot of competition but I'd like to actually see how they hold up vs. regular SSDs. There is a bit of a false expectation when you buy a laptop with a ssd, expecting the endurance of a regular ssd and getting something potentially awfully bad.
- kabdib 12y agoHave seen quite a few Sandisk SSDs die over the past 3-4 years. Ditto, OCZ. Yet to see an Intel or Samsung bite the dust. I'm sure it's only a matter of time, but I won't buy any other brands.
- simoncion 12y agoI have an OCZ Vertex LE that's still going strong after a little over 27,800 power on hours and ~18.6 TB of data written. I would be shocked if "Judge reliability on drive models, rather than manufacturers." was any less true in the SSD era than it was in the HDD era.
- vidarh 12y agoYou're right, sort of. Most of the time that's certainly the case. But OCZ QA appears to have fallen off a cliff at some point, to the extent where it was presumably a large factor in their bankruptcy, and it was a systemic problem with most OCZ models. A huge list of models have failure rates way above average, with a number of them exceeding 5%, and some claiming that the failure rate for some of the Octane and Petrol models exceeded 30%. The best ones have been in line with other manufacturers, though. Unfortunately the problems were so widespread that your odds of picking a "safe" OCZ drive for a while were ridiculously bad, unless you were prepared to wait for a year or two to get hard numbers on a model before buying. The Vertex line has been a crapshot, for example. Several of the Vertex 2 models had unreasonably high failure rates (5%-10% range). Your Vertex LE is as far as I know based on a different design/controller than the regular Vertex 2 and might have "escaped" the Vertex 2 problems. The Vertex 3 appears to have been much better (and none of the Vertex 3's we have have failed). Vertex 4 has been disastrously bad for us - every single one failed hard after less than a year, to the point where even the SMART data is partially corrupted on most of the drives (claiming it's been powered on for 75 million years for example..), and marked the end of buying OCZ drives for our part.
- jcampbell1 12y agoThese SSDs are failing at roughly 3000 write-out cycles. Traditional hard drives can take 6 hours to write out, so doing a similar test would take ~2 years. Spinning disks are so freaking slow that you could never test the reliability apples-to-apples. Any workload that wears out an SSD could never be run on a traditional HD.
- CPAhem 12y agoA very good point, but it would still be good to see a comparison, even if it does take 2 years to run on a traditional HD.
- colordrops 12y agoThe fact that they work better than spec indicates to me that we are still at the forefront of this technology with good engineering effort behind it. Once it matures and companies try to squeeze out every dollar, expect them to fail a lot more and the MTBF to be less than advertised, similar to printers etc
- arenaninja 12y agoDoes anyone know if there's a utility that monitors SSD health? I've a 512GB SSD, which I'll probably keep for a while, but I don't like being in the dark about how far along its lifetime I am
- jewel 12y agosmartmontools work good on the command line in linux. There's also a GUI called palimpsest which makes the SMART numbers easy to read. On other operating systems any tool that can read the SMART data is what you should look for.
- Eiriksmal 12y agosmartmontools can be utter crap when it comes to interpreting SSD data. Some manufacturers seem to deliberately program the SSDs to report SMART data incorrectly, or report correct data under the wrong code[0], just to encourage you to use their proprietary software. I have an 840 Pro in one server that works okay with smartctl, but the Corsair Neutron GTX in a different server has readings all over the board that are utterly useless. [0] http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=89316 http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=89316
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- emddudley 12y agoSamsung drives come with Samsung Magician, which is a pretty nice utility.
- AndyNemmity 12y agoAnd the only time I've lost a drive was due to a Magician firmware upgrade that was wrong. I now avoid it out of general fear.
- higherpurpose 12y agoI wish they tested a Crucial drive, too. Crucial drives tend to have great dollar/GB ratio.
- ck2 12y agoThe intel failed to reach the petabyte mark. This is interesting because many datacenters use the intel.
- daurnimator 12y agoThough it is noted they intentionally fail: > The Intel 335 Series is designed to check out voluntarily after a predetermined number of writes. That drive dutifully bricked itself after 750TB
- dragontamer 12y agoThis is also the consumer drive instead of the enterprise drive.
- rasz_pl 12y agohahaha Did you really believe that claim? Intel drive documentation states clearly drive should switch to READ ONLY mode, instead it DIED.
- callesgg 12y agoSo not entering read only mode after life end seams like a very dangerus bug that is not realy accepteble. Sidenote: Articles like this always scares the shit out of me I have a kingston ssd that has been in my main server for almost 3 years now. The smart data seams to say that it is 100% fine but as it has been on for 24* 365*3 hours that seams unlikely.
- rocky1138 12y agoYes, but your data is on more than one drive, yes? Presumably you have some sort of RAID setup whereas if the one drive were to truly fail, another would pick up in its place.
- callesgg 12y agoPartialy, I do backups of everything that is mine, documents and stuff like that. But restoring the entire system with all tweaks and packets would probably take weeks.
- bigiain 12y agoWhy? Give the startlingly low cost of storage these days, I can't imagine a scenario where I'd risk "weeks" of productivity just to save on the raw storage cost of doing a complete (and i my case, bootable) "entire system" backup/archive.
- callesgg 12y agoIs not about money it is about ROI setting up a backup system would be some work and doing backups verifying that they work everything takes time (time to remake system - the time it would take to do backups)/(the risk of failure) I think it is to low
- bigiain 12y agoFair enough - for me rsync(+bash+cron) and a $80 external usb drive (or just clicking the buttons on TimeMachine on Mac OS X boxen) is a small enough "I" to easily justify the "R" - even for data I could retrieve easily enough if needed. For data I actually care about, I put a lot more effort/money into ensuring I don't lose it.
- alecco 12y agoI can't find in the article if those were sequential 1.5PB writes or random small writes (i.e. < 4KB). If the later case, this article should be flagged.
- joshvm 12y agoThis is encouraging although even tests on early drives showed that an 'average' drive should last far longer than people need them for - purely based on the number of allowed writes. 750TB? That's more data than my department, an imaging research group, have on our cluster... There are some more tests which are very hard to do because you need time and a large sample size, for instance what's the data retention time for a typical SSD? As far as I can tell, nobody really knows because you'd need to leave the drive off for probably more than a year - and as soon as you turn the drive on, presumably you refresh the charge that's leaked out? Most of the time this isn't a problem because almost everyone turns on their PC or laptop weekly/monthly if not daily.
- sounds 12y ago> as soon as you turn the drive on, presumably you refresh the charge No, bits lose their charge slowly but it doesn't matter whether the SSD is powered on or off. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/256180-32-read-longevity http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/256180-32-read-longevity As a side note, the really interesting thing about this endurance test is that almost all the drives fail badly at the end of their life. Even though almost all the manufacturers specifically claim they "fail safe" into a read-only mode.
- frozenport 12y agoIt's frequently assumed that breakdowns are geometric random variables and we can extrapolate the rate by testing many drives. For example, test 100 drives.and find when the first one breaks. The numbers in this test should be interpreted as an average with some drives breaking earlier. Now consider the failure rates for drives where the file is spread across multiple disks.
- dzhiurgis 12y agoIf you don't have much RAM I suppose you'd hit these limits much faster as OS would swap a lot of data onto drive.
- alexbecker 12y agoIf you're swapping regularly then you have more immediate computer needs than a fast hard drive.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoI am concerned about the lack of read-only at EOL. I, for one, would much prefer slightly less longevity and better reliability than vice versa. I mean, I do backups, but backups only do so much.
- chroma 12y agoBackups only do so much? Could you elaborate on what your backups don't do? My backups allow me to recover from theft, hardware failure, accidental deletion, and more. If my computer were to burst into flames right now, I would only lose 30 minutes of work. Even if SSDs reliably went read-only at the end of their service life, I would still keep my existing backup strategy. There are so many ways to lose data without disk failure.
- shdon 12y agoBackups don't keep your system somewhat running in the event of failure. And unless you run a full image backup, it takes much more time and effort to restore from a data-only backup than to simply do a direct copy off of a write-locked but perfectly readable drive.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoI have a laptop, and as such tend to use it on-the-go. As such, backups won't capture anything after the last time I had access to my backup volume. Also, again, I don't always have access to my backup volume. I'm not saying "I wish that they would go read-only so I didn't have to back up" - I am perfectly well aware of the need to back things up.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- listic 12y agoThey should have included Samsung 850 Pro, which sells since August. http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_7?url=search-alias%3Dcomputers&field-keywords=850%20pro&sprefix=850+pro%2Caps%2C411 http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_7?url=search-alia...
- OniBait 12y agoThat would've been a bit hard to do seeing as how the endurance test has been running for over a year. Even with SSDs, 1.5 petabytes of reads/writes takes a while to write.
- userbinator 12y agoThe main issue I have with this form of testing is that it's basically measuring the ultimate endurance characteristics of the flash - running program/erase cycles until some piece of the flash becomes completely unusable. The majority of the time the first failure will occur in a user data block, but there's a nonzero chance that it's in a block mapping table or the firmware itself, and that will definitely cause catastrophic failure. The article seems to be implying that it's OK to write more data than the manufacturer specifies, but this is not something anyone should ever be doing in a real-world scenario, because retention is inversely proportional to endurance and also (exponentially!) to temperature. A drive that retains data for a week at 20C may not be able to at 30C or even 25C. The 840 Pro's reallocated sector count appears to have started rising at 600TB, which is roughly 2400 P/E cycles, on average, of the whole flash - this is not surprising and agrees with the typical endurance figure of 2K-3K for 2x nm MLC. I've never agreed fully with the reasoning behind MLC - yes, it's technically twice the capacity for the same die area/price as SLC (or alternatively, half the area/price for the same capacity), but it's also nearly two orders of magnitude less endurance/retention and requires far more controller complexity for error correction and bad-block management. In a storage device, I think reliability is more important than capacity - even with backups, no one wants to lose any data. The tradeoff doesn't make so much sense to me - theoretically, you could buy an MLC SSD that wears out after a few years (thus needing replace it and copy the existing data over to the new one, along with all the risks that causes, etc.), or for only twice as much, an SLC one that probably won't ever need replacing. A 256GB SLC SSD with 100K P/E cycle flash is conceivably good for 25PB and 5-10 years, or <1PB and over a century... i.e. you could probably use one for archival if stored in a good environment. Part of me thinks the manufacturers just don't want to make such long-lasting products, hence the strong association of SLC to "enterprise" products. (And the much higher pricing of SLC SSDs, more than the raw price of NAND would suggest.)
- vidarh 12y agoThe rationale is that most people will never approach those kind of number of P/E cycles, and so people would rathe pay for more space, or pay less. Even in many cases in enterprise settings. We have some cheapish SSD's in use for some of our high traffic database servers. We lost some drives that failed catastrophically, and the company we bought it from "suggested" we might have worn them out and maybe we didn't have a reason to RMA them, and perhaps we just ought to buy more expensive enterprise models next time. So we checked the SMART data, and after a year of what to us is heavy 24/7 use with a large percentage of writes, we'd gone through less than 10% of the P/E cycles. (We did our RMA, and it was very clear that this was a problem with the model/batch - all the failed drives were OCZ Vertex drives from when their failure rate shot through the roof before the bankruptcy) All our other SSD's are chugging along nicely; the oldest have suffered through 3-4 years of heavy database traffic. I am just waiting for the oldest ones to start failing. At that rate it doesn't matter if they won't survive as long as SLC anyway: We'll end up replacing them with faster, higher capacity newer models soon anyway - we usually do on a 3-5 year cycle depending on hardware and needs -, because it's more cost-effective for us to upgrade regularly to increase our hosting density as it helps us avoid taking more rack space, and colocation space/power/cooling costs us more than the amortised cost of the hardware. The consumer market is similar: Most people don't ever buy replacements for failed drives - they buy a newer computer.
- tytso 12y agoThe definition of wear out is more than just the SSD declaring the cell bad, or the SSD failing suddenly. A cell is technically declared worn out when the chance that the cell suffer charge leakage after N months at temperature T exceeds probability P. (Where exactly what these parameters are are a secret that the SSD vendors don't disclose. There are some standards, but the SSD vendors don't necessarily use those standards when the make promises about their product's wear endurance. So even though an SSD might last for 1.5 PB's worth of writes, there is no guarantee that if you were to then put the SSD on a shelf and wait nine months, that they data will still be good. This is probably one some vendors will declare themselves to be dead after so many gigabytes worth of writes, even if the flash cells haven't "failed" yet. Otherwise users might depend on the SSD's contents being retained, when in fact they might suffer data loss. But of course, this doesn't really matter much, because you treat all data stored on SSD's as a cache, and do regular backups, RIGHT? :-)
- camillomiller 12y agoOf course, on magnetic tapes!
- allegory 12y agoI still use a Quantum VS160 DLT to back up my SSD... The thing plugs straight into my laptop via no brand cheapo SCSI/USB bridge much to the laughing from my colleagues (apart from the ops team who understand why I do it). Being an ex EE, I understand exactly how "transient" the state of an SSD is. Electrons; gotta catch 'em all.
- qwerta 12y agoThere was test at czech site diit.cz. SSD survived several overwrites. But after it was left disconnected for several months without power, it lost all data. Apparently SSD needs to repower its cells periodically.
- masklinn 12y agoNote that the techreport includes a component of leaving SSDs unpowered to verify exactly that kind of issues. Although it's not a very long one.
- gambiting 12y agoI've always been curious - I understand that memory cells have their own durability, but how about the controllers that are used to transfer that data? Do they wear out too? In fact, can a CPU fail after having exobytes of data sent through it?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y agoIf an SSD is written to once, and kept powered on (and at a temperature in the low 70s), while getting regular reads, how long can I expect this drive to last? If that drive is powered on, but kept at low temperatures (say near or below freezing), does this help it survive longer? What failure modes would occur in such an environment? Would it just be power surges frying the thing, static electricity?
- abvdasker 12y agoReally excellent writing on these pieces. I lol'd at "dutifully bricked itself". If only all tech writing were as colorfully engaging.