Avoid erasing NAND as much as possible

[KingFatty]

ON that site where they abuse the SSDs till they break, are they saying there is a Kingston that is still going strong with over 1000 TERAbytes written to it???!!!

 

[_Rick_]

Yes HDDs fail, but it's not part of their design.

They are mechanical devices. Of course they have pre-determined durability, by machining precision, bearing lifetime, motor lifetime, environment isolation, and many other things that fail over time.

Not to mention, that they also embark some DRAM for cache, which also has a limited life-time.

I wonder how long a (cheap consumer - we're comparing with MLC SSDs after all) drive would last, if it were to run 24/7 random read/writes. It would probably make it through the warranty phase, but beyond that, I'd doubt that it would keep going very much longer.

Hard drives are the item with the second highest "mid-life" death rate after PSUs for me (anecdotal evidence across only a few dozen devices).

 

[jiffylube1024]

Everything old is new again...


http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page218

Samsung 840 - FINAL REPORT - DEAD - As of Day 52

Drive Hours: 1235
ASU GiB Written (APPROX): 443,309.73 (432.92 TiB)
Avg MB/s (APPROX): 101.10
MD5: OK

Wear Leveling Count (B1): 3556 raw (1 normalized)

Reallocated blocks (B3,05): 659 (79 normalized)
Failure count (B5, B6): 0 program, 0 erase
Uncorrectable Error Count: 0
ECC Error Rate (C3): 0

Drive is dead and does not respond to anything anymore.

The main concerning thing is that the drive said it did not trigger any smart warnings before dieing! I was not able to get any useful screenshots from ASU or crystaldiskinfo after the drive died (as neither would paint their windows trying to access the drive)

Friends don't let friends buy TLC NAND Flash for their main drives, otherwise they will continue manufacturing them. Not being read-only is a bad end-life trend.

Obviously if you're writing 430TB (430,000 GB!!!) to an SSD in 52 days, you're basically hammering the thing with I/O's non-stop for its entire life. Yes SLC NAND would have probably lasted longer, but most desktop users, after installing Windows and their programs, won't write more than 100-500GB of Data per year. 430TB of NAND rewrites is like writing 250GB to the drive 1720 times. That is not even approaching the neighborhood of normal usage.

 

[Anteaus]

SSDs die everyday for any number of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with write limits. The fact is that while the technology is maturing there are still issues that on a bad day will brick a drive or force a wipe on a good day.

People like to talk about reliability of SSD versus HDD, but in my experience I find that all things being equal SSDs die at faster rates than HDDs for reasons that can't always be explained. HDDs aren't usually so spontaneous in their failures.

Bottom line, I wouldn't worry about write limits much because chances are if your SSD fails it will likely be any number of other reasons and not that. If most SSDs currently in circulation today actually survived to see the end of their service lives, the number of reported failures would be dramatically lower. I don't buy into the whole reliability PR.

I'm definitely pro SSD but it is a luxury at this stage and you should be full aware that there may come a day where it will stop working. If that is something that you can't deal with or aren't willing to risk money on, I'd just stick with HDDs for now. My .02.

 

[yefi]

People like to talk about reliability of SSD versus HDD, but in my experience I find that all things being equal SSDs die at faster rates than HDDs for reasons that can't always be explained. HDDs aren't usually so spontaneous in their failures.

If you believe a certain set of notorious return rates for a major French retailer, then on average SSDs are returned 25% less often than HDDs. That figure would be better but for OCZ; Samsung and Intel's return rates are under 1%, better than for any conventional drive.

Clearly, these figures are from perfect for judging reliability. They don't include RMAs to manufacturer for one thing, but they at least lend some credence to the assertion that SSDs are inherently more reliable (or can be more reliable) than HDDs.

 

[Anteaus]

If you believe a certain set of notorious return rates for a major French retailer, then on average SSDs are returned 25% less often than HDDs. That figure would be better but for OCZ; Samsung and Intel's return rates are under 1%, better than for any conventional drive.

Clearly, these figures are from perfect for judging reliability. They don't include RMAs to manufacturer for one thing, but they at least lend some credence to the assertion that SSDs are inherently more reliable (or can be more reliable) than HDDs.

Agreed. The figures also don't consider when drives go nuts and return to normal after a reformat. In my opinion any issue that causes involuntary data loss is a failure, even if that failure doesn't necessary indicate failed hardware or result in a RMA. I think poor firmware is a major cause of many of the earlier SSD issues.

 

[BrightCandle]

When SSDs were released I was hoping that storage went from HDD levels of reliability to solid component levels, ie CPU/RAM/Motherboard levels of reliability. It hasn't happened.

Some drives are pretty reliable but I have more than half the SSDs I owned (all the OCZ drives, Intel X25M still going strong as is the M4) fail well before they should have given flash life.

Put simply flash life isn't really an issue for a heavily used computer, the components are still too unreliable to last much more than a year or so despite the fact they should last as well as the other solid components.

 

[groberts101]

it's not even close to being solely the components themselves.. it's the software used to glue it all together that's giving issues about 99% of the time. And it's not just the software on the SSD, either.

 

[PeeluckyDuckee]

I've had my Kingston HyperX SSD for almost 2yrs now. It's not very often I would do massive writes to the SSD, but I am more worried about the SSD hard die on my than anything else. I have more than one copy of important data spread over 3 HDDs and some on the cloud.

I am waiting for 512GB SSDs to reach $200 levels before I grab another one. Would probably get one with a store purchased extended in-store replacement warranty for the peace of mind.