6 ms·

SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write durability.

by bifrost 11y ago

SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write durability. Until there is parity its still a bit of an arms race for capacity. Hybrid drives are pretty awful so I don't think they'll stick around. I could see Hierarchical Storage Management make a comeback and an entry to the consumer space, but thats been esoteric at best.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
False. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
- cjensen 11y ago
  True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month. In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail. Edit: Burning up an SSD was how I learned that TRIM is unnecessary: even though many parts of the filesystem were stable and never re-written, the bandwidth was even across the entire drive. The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly.
  - Someone 11y ago
    "In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail." You call that a catch? I would sell it as a feature. It's way better than "looks OK until t minus 1, can't read or write from time t onwards" or lesser variants of the "try reading everything a few times, and you may get 90% of your data back"
  - yuhong 11y ago
    I wonder how fast it would be to boot Windows with a SSD like this.
  - outworlder 11y ago
    > The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly. It moved data off them, but had to move it somewhere. I would have just rewritten them outright if it had known they were actually free.
  - aNoob7000 11y ago
    Can you please elaborate on what application would basically kill an SSD in a month? It is my understanding that the Crucial M500 drives support something like 72TB of writes. Please don't take any offense, I'm just interested in how you were using the drive.
    - cjensen 11y ago
      Continuous record of 8 streams of 220Mb/s video. There were 10 SSDs for storage in a RAID-6 configuration. So the effective endurance of the RAID was (10 - 2) * 72TB = 720TB. 8 Streams of 220Mb/s is 220/s, 13.2GB/minute, 792GB/hour, 19TB/day. So about 38 days.
wpietri 11y ago
Do they? The article specifically says otherwise and links to this: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/netapp-no-ssds-have-worn-out/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/netap... It also mentions that the 3D NAND process dramatically improves matters over previous tech. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's weird that you don't acknowledge that the article addresses your point.
cjensen 11y ago
While you are correct that you can nuke a normal SSD in a month, you can buy high-endurance drives which will last much longer. For example, you can buy a p400m with 7.5PB of write endurance [1]. It's just a question of making sure you buy a part that matches your need. If you're writing more than 7.5PB in a month... I'm prepared to be amazed :-) [1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p400m-ssd-enterprise,3424.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p400m-ssd-enterprise,342...
Freaky 11y ago
Endurance is really not a concern for the vast majority of consumers. The media wearout indicator on my 19-month old cheap TLC drive has dropped 2%, and I'm a fairly heavy user. The vast majority of SSD failures seem to be a result of firmware faults.
moonbug 11y ago
https://www.nimblestorage.com https://www.nimblestorage.com make what's essentially a flash+disk hybrid HSM-in-a-box. They're very nice, from experience.

by bifrost 11y ago

toomuchtodo 11y ago

False. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

cjensen 11y ago
True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month. In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail. Edit: Burning up an SSD was how I learned that TRIM is unnecessary: even though many parts of the filesystem were stable and never re-written, the bandwidth was even across the entire drive. The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly.
- Someone 11y ago
  "In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail." You call that a catch? I would sell it as a feature. It's way better than "looks OK until t minus 1, can't read or write from time t onwards" or lesser variants of the "try reading everything a few times, and you may get 90% of your data back"
- yuhong 11y ago
  I wonder how fast it would be to boot Windows with a SSD like this.
- outworlder 11y ago
  > The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly. It moved data off them, but had to move it somewhere. I would have just rewritten them outright if it had known they were actually free.
- aNoob7000 11y ago
  Can you please elaborate on what application would basically kill an SSD in a month? It is my understanding that the Crucial M500 drives support something like 72TB of writes. Please don't take any offense, I'm just interested in how you were using the drive.
  - cjensen 11y ago
    Continuous record of 8 streams of 220Mb/s video. There were 10 SSDs for storage in a RAID-6 configuration. So the effective endurance of the RAID was (10 - 2) * 72TB = 720TB. 8 Streams of 220Mb/s is 220/s, 13.2GB/minute, 792GB/hour, 19TB/day. So about 38 days.

wpietri 11y ago

Do they? The article specifically says otherwise and links to this: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/netapp-no-ssds-have-worn-out/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/netap... It also mentions that the 3D NAND process dramatically improves matters over previous tech. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's weird that you don't acknowledge that the article addresses your point.

cjensen 11y ago

While you are correct that you can nuke a normal SSD in a month, you can buy high-endurance drives which will last much longer. For example, you can buy a p400m with 7.5PB of write endurance [1]. It's just a question of making sure you buy a part that matches your need. If you're writing more than 7.5PB in a month... I'm prepared to be amazed :-) [1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p400m-ssd-enterprise,3424.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p400m-ssd-enterprise,342...

Freaky 11y ago

Endurance is really not a concern for the vast majority of consumers. The media wearout indicator on my 19-month old cheap TLC drive has dropped 2%, and I'm a fairly heavy user. The vast majority of SSD failures seem to be a result of firmware faults.

moonbug 11y ago

https://www.nimblestorage.com https://www.nimblestorage.com make what's essentially a flash+disk hybrid HSM-in-a-box. They're very nice, from experience.