TechReport torture test piles on more than 700 terabytes before first failures.
by Lee Hutchinson - June 17 2014How long, exactly, do SSDs last? It’s a difficult question to answer because estimating an SSD’s life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more. When we did our in-depth examination of how SSDs work a couple of years back, we looked a bit at how those factors affect drive life, but TechReport is going even further than that and has been subjecting six drives to a long-term torture testto actually measure, rather than estimate, the drives’ service life.
The results are impressive: the consumer-grade SSDs tested all made it to at least 700TB of writes before failing. Three of the drives have written 1PB (that’s a thousand terabytes, by TechReport’s decimal reckoning, not 1024TB). That’s a hell of a lot more writes than the manufacturers’ stated drive lifetimes, and that’s good news for SSD-buying consumers.
An SSD with dedupe and compression receives a write. The controller looks at the data, figures out what parts are repeated elsewhere, and only stores the unique parts. Additionally, if the red or blue chunks were already on the drive, they'd be discarded, further reducing data to be written.
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