An investigation into the shelf life of SSDs has concluded that in a year the technology has improved dramatically.
Techreport carried out a test to see how many writes an SSD could survive before burning out. IT also tracked how each one’s performance characteristics and health statistics changed as the writes accumulated.
The Corsair Neutron Series GTX, Intel 335 Series, Kingston HyperX 3K, and Samsung 840 Series died absorbing far more damage than its official endurance specification promised—and far more than the vast majority of users are likely to inflict.
The 840 Pro and a second HyperX 3K have so far reached two petabytes of writes. Most people’s SSDs would be pushed to have more than terabytes of writes in a couple of years.
Intel’s 335 Series is designed to go out on its own terms, after a pre-determined volume of writes. It died after 750TB but at least warned everyone it was about to croak.
The HyperX 3K only made it to 728TB. Unlike the 335 Series, which was almost entirely free of failed flash, the HyperX reallocated nearly a thousand sectors before it died.
The Samsung 840 Series started reporting reallocated sectors after just 100TB. The 840 Series went on to log thousands of reallocated sectors before going to disk heaven.
Corsair’s Neutron GTX was the picture of health up to 1.1PB, it suffered a rash of flash failures over the next 100TB. It reached 1.2PB but refused to power up after a reboot. The 840 Pro and second HyperX 3K managed 2PB.
What this means is that SSDs are now reaching a point where they are pretty reliable over a long period of time. For your average user, a person would have to be using any one of these drives for more than 500 years before they died.
