SSD Wear Rates?

[mfenn]

Supposedly Windows needs some page file. How about making it 256mb?

It's not Windows so much as programs that try to be "clever" about the way they use the page file. Random programs will indeed break if you don't have a page file at all, usually with non-obvious errors. I do exactly what you suggest, manually set the page file size to some nominal amount (I use 1GB).

 

[frostedflakes]

The 34nm NAND on the Samsung 470 is up to nearly 32,000 P/E cycles. Pretty interesting considering it's only rated for 5,000.

 

[DirkGently1]

The 34nm NAND on the Samsung 470 is up to nearly 32,000 P/E cycles. Pretty interesting considering it's only rated for 5,000.

How many of the drives currently being tested do you think will make it to 1PB and beyond? I reckon the Sammy and Intel 320 are safe bets, but perhaps they all have that and more in them.

If Samsung brought the price of the 470 down a bit they could have a sales monster on their hands. It could become the budget SSD of choice.

 

[BrightCandle]

I had one of the Original X25-M 80GB SSDs and it was obsolete long before it ran out of writes. In 2 years I managed to use 6% of its life while hammering it every day.

The Vertex 2 E on the other hand shows 100% left after 5137 hours on.

They last ages.

 

[mnewsham]

How many of the drives currently being tested do you think will make it to 1PB and beyond? I reckon the Sammy and Intel 320 are safe bets, but perhaps they all have that and more in them.

If Samsung brought the price of the 470 down a bit they could have a sales monster on their hands. It could become the budget SSD of choice.

got my 64GB Samsung 470 for ~80bucks on sale about 5 months ago.

 

[frostedflakes]

How many of the drives currently being tested do you think will make it to 1PB and beyond? I reckon the Sammy and Intel 320 are safe bets, but perhaps they all have that and more in them.

If Samsung brought the price of the 470 down a bit they could have a sales monster on their hands. It could become the budget SSD of choice.

Your guess is as good as mine, I never would have expected the dinky 40GB and 64GB SSDs being tested to handle hundreds of TB of writes, but they have far exceeded my expectations.

Not sure about the Samsung, but I think the rest will make it to 1PB with ease. I mean the Samsung has a write amplification of over 5x and look at how well it's holding up. This is a testament to the durability of flash and proof that the manufacturer's rated P/E cycles is not necessarily indicative of real-world write endurance. People were so worried about the write limit of NAND flash in SSDs, but the more empirical data that comes out the more it seems to be a non-issue. There is a paper that explains why this is the case.

http://www.usenix.org/event/hotstorage10/tech/full_papers/Mohan.pdf

With a recovery period between writes NAND flash can handle significantly more writes than the manufacturer's P/E rating suggests. Looks like recovery period for the NAND in the Samsung 470 is about 113 seconds, which in that research corresponds to a tenfold increase in endurance for 2-bit 50nm MLC. Based on this assumption, if the cells are rated for 5,000 P/E cycles, that means they should be able to handle about 50,000 cycles. So that would put projected write exhaustion at 600TB, somewhere in that area.

The Intel and other drives not only have far lower write amplification than the Samsung, they also aren't being written to as quickly, which means longer recovery period and higher endurance. So they should all last well past 1PB I think.

 

[DirkGently1]

The Samsung 470 bit the dust some time ago. First properly recorded case of SSD nand death in the wild so far? The Crucial M4 has now surpassed it and looks to be stretching it's legs, while the Intel 320 is still pottering along quite nicely!

 

[Jeff7]

Intel SSD here. The SMART data says it's been powered on for 5100 hours, and it's up to 4.35TB of writes. Media wearout indicator: 98.
So, that's somewhere around 0.85GB/hr.

It's my Windows/Applications drive, as well as the drive for my pagefile, and also a few folders for temporary files for whatever project I'm working on.

Even if it does somehow only last a few years, it's still worth it. A solid state drive really gives a good increase in performance.

 

[mfenn]

The Samsung 470 bit the dust some time ago. First properly recorded case of SSD nand death in the wild so far? The Crucial M4 has now surpassed it and looks to be stretching it's legs, while the Intel 320 is still pottering along quite nicely!

Nice, that's quite a bit longer than Samsung promises. Especially considering that Jeff's case is probably more typical (7.5TB/year). So the Samsung would "only" last 63.7 years under normal usage!

 

[paperwastage]

hmm.... i should see how well my Kingston 96GB V+100 holds... from the graphs, it looks like there is a reason why it's cheaper than the rest of the SSDs

It's not Windows so much as programs that try to be "clever" about the way they use the page file. Random programs will indeed break if you don't have a page file at all, usually with non-obvious errors. I do exactly what you suggest, manually set the page file size to some nominal amount (I use 1GB).

or if you use a desktop, place the pagefile on a mechanical HDD

 

[corkyg]

Has anyone taken a look at this software? http://www.ssd-life.com/ Seems like it could be useful to answer some of these types of questions.

 

[DirkGently1]

Has anyone taken a look at this software? http://www.ssd-life.com/ Seems like it could be useful to answer some of these types of questions.

Yes, if the question is, "Name one piece of software that will tell you absolutely nothing useful about the longevity of your SSD.."

 

[Binky]

My Vertex 120gb just kicked the bucket after about 27 months of heavy use. Crystaldisk listed it as 79% "healthy," although that was after it started getting a bit glitchy. I have no idea what that "health" reading really means for an SSD.

That's not bad really. I've had mechanical drives with both much longer and much shorter useful lives.

 

[paperwastage]

My Vertex 120gb just kicked the bucket after about 27 months of heavy use. Crystaldisk listed it as 79% "healthy," although that was after it started getting a bit glitchy. I have no idea what that "health" reading really means for an SSD.

That's not bad really. I've had mechanical drives with both much longer and much shorter useful lives.

warranty right? so RMA

mechnical HDDs themselves have a 5% failure rate?

 

[MrPeteH]

There's some misinformation in this thread.
For a variety of reasons, HDD reliability has decreased in recent years, not least due to the advent of PRML technology, which compresses data far more than in the past, and makes data recovery more difficult. Across the board, HDDs fail in the long run at a greater than 1% per year rate. That's similar to the reliability of old floppy disks.

SSD's are turning out to be somewhat more reliable in the long run, but not hugely better. Sure, the write "runout" is not a problem, but there are many other electronic failure modes. And the scary thing is that when an SSD fails, it tends to fail catastrophically: you lose the entire drive. That's quite rare with HDDs.

If you are running on an SSD and assuming you don't need a backup, you are running on borrowed time. Backups are just as important, if not moreso, than with HDDs.

One very real reliability advantage in some situations: if you need ultra performance, and to get it you used to use a cluster of HDDs, you can replace that cluster with a single SSD. Fewer drives == fewer failures.

Here's a link to one page (key page) of a nicely done investigation into the issue.

Hope this is helpful!

 

[Muse]

Step 1: build your computer
Step 2: Boot into the windows 7 installation DVD
Step 3: When asked to select the drive to install the OS to select the SSD (usually the smallest of the drives)
Step 4: continue with the installation
Step 5: finish with the installation
Step 6: boot into windows
Step 7: stop reading these steps

Boy, that sounds easy. AFAIK, I've never been within 50 yards of an SSD, but I'm intrigued. Every time I have to reboot one of my machines, that is. Which is frequently! Very frequently! :| Plus I suffered a catastrophic HD failure (I had no previous hint that anything was wrong) and that HD had my most recent data. My backups were somewhat old, so I lost some stuff and it was a bitch to figure out what and how much and where my most recent data was, ad nauseum. Hopefully, SSD's are more reliable. The failed drive was a 2.5", 250 or 320GB, don't remember the size.

 

[IGemini]

Might as well toss my progress in the pool.

Have had my 25nm Force for almost five months and it's been on for at least four. It serves as my OS and game drive, still has everything active that people turn off/move for worry of drive wear (swap file, prefetch, etc). I haven't shuffled games a lot since I play several at once , but writes won't wear this drive down (despite it's 3,000 PE cycle life IIRC)

 

[mfenn]

And the scary thing is that when an SSD fails, it tends to fail catastrophically: you lose the entire drive. That's quite rare with HDDs.

Rare relative to the BER, sure. Rare in an absolute sense, hell no.

 

[Mark R]

Either that or it just doesn't report the NAND lifetime properly.

There was a firmware bug in the Intel G2 series where SMART didn't report the drive life-time remaining properly.

This was fixed in the most recent update that came out at about the time of the 320 series.

The problem was that the "lifetime remaining" counter went down about 3x as fast as it should have done. LOL.

 

[Ayah]

Intel X-25G2 80GB

Power On Hours 12574
Host Writes: 2827.84GB
Media Wear Indicator: 99

This thing could theoretically outlive me at my rate of usage, if I were to never buy a new drive.

 

[pitz]

~2 years old... The numbers are actually a little higher than this since the firmware was re-flashed 6 months after I got it.

 

[Muse]

Rare relative to the BER, sure. Rare in an absolute sense, hell no.

The above quote was in response to a poster saying that sudden catastrophic HD failures are rare.

Yeah, I've owned a lot of HDs, probably pushing 20 now. Somewhere like that. I've had one failure, it was about 6-8 months ago and it was sudden, total, catastrophic and with absolutely no warning. Worse, among the 10 or so HD's I have in my several machines it was THE one that had my most important up to date data. NEVER trust a HD.

 

[Paperlantern]

I agree, you can't trust an HDD, ever. Always back up. That said, I'm running two Sammy 470s in RAID 0 to make a 128GB drive that absolutely screams. Not that it's terribly reliable, but the windows experience index for the drive in my system is maxed out at 7.9. It boots very fast, programs come up in fractions of seconds, not in seconds. I'm very happy with it, and though some might think that running to SSDs in RAID 0 extremely volatile and I'm asking for trouble, but I'm not worried. I've never been one to keep anything important on the system volume of any machine I use on a regular basis, and the day to day performance increase has already more than made up for more than one reinstall of windows, if I even ever have to. The system itself is over 5 years old hardware wise and it does everything I need it to do blazing fast. I don't foresee me needing an upgrade of an kind anytime soon and the drives will probably still be working when the time comes to upgrade.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Under normal use the wear-leveling will keep the drive working for 5-10 years before it switches to read-only access, and by then you'll be building a new system anyway.

How many 5 year old platter drives are you using on a daily basis now?

This. Even non-enthusiests rarely keep their computers more than 5 years. That is about the time that everyone decides to replace their system. Enthusiests every 6 months to 3 years.

I have some Intel G1's in a RAID-0 array. Never ran into any problems with the array. They have been absolutely solid for about the 2 years that I have had them. I checked the wear level indicator, they are at 98%. I have written over 1TB to each of them. Anyway... i'd be far, far, far more worried about a hard drive crash than an SSD crash, unless I had an Indilinx or Sandsforce based drive. Intel, Samsung = Reliable. No issues.

 

[mfenn]

I agree, you can't trust storage, ever. Always back up.

Slightly fixed, and I agree 100%. I don't care if you have the most reliable storage device ever made, it will fail whenever Murphy decides that it would be most inconvenient. Dan said it best, "Any data that you only have one copy of is data that you don't mind losing."