Incredible Samsung 840 Pro MLC endurance

[SSBrain]

I just have to share this:

http://www.vojcik.net/samsung-ssd-840-endurance-destruct-test/

This person made a write endurance test on a Samsung 840 Pro, 128 GB version in order to check out if it was suitable for data center usage, but he eventually found out that the drive lasted way way more than 3,000 P/E cycles before dying!

After 5 months of continuous writing, the drive reached >24,400 P/E cycles and > 3 PiB written!

Interesting usage/wear charts have been posted on his blog post.

Hard to tell what was the data retention after so many writes, though, or even after "only" 2 PiB of writes or so.

 

[Teizo]

Man, 20GB of data daily and it will last 65 years...

 

[SSBrain]

Man, 20GB of data daily and it will last 65 years...

That's at 465 TiB, when the normalized wearout indicator reached 1% (3000 P/E cycles). However on consumer NAND memory "end life" only means that past that point data retention might not be guaranteed to be 1 year anymore (in addition to other bit error rate parameters), although in practice it might still be much more than that. In fact, the main reason why NAND memory on enterprise SSDs appears to last significantly more than one consumer ones is because on those end life is rated for a residual data retention of 3 months.

This should show that the NAND on MLC 840 Samsung SSD drives should be about as good as that on the previous 830 drives. There was one tested on the XtremeSystems forum which saw over 28000 P/E cycles. Unfortunately it died minutes after turning it off. Data retention gets extremely short when NAND wear becomes extreme.