After 1.5 PB of recording, two SSDs remained alive

Backblaze engineers updated HDD reliability statistics yesterday . A couple of days before this, the results of another interesting experiment became known - on the survival of SSD drives .

The computer edition of The Tech Report last August began testing SSDs. The goal is to check how many rewriting cycles each of the six instances will sustain. The experiment lasted a whole year: after recording 1 petabyte , three drives remained alive , and after 1.5 petabyte, two remained.

At the start of the marathon came the Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, Intel 335 Series 240GB, Samsung 840 Series 250GB, Samsung 840 Pro 256GB and two Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB.


Anvil Storage Utilities was chosen for testing.

As a result, all six drives exceeded the failure rate indicated in the technical specifications, and three were able to overcome the petabyte mark.

First losses:
Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB - 728 TB
Intel 335 Series 240GB - 750 TB (failed voluntarily when the programmed write cycle indicator was reached, although the flash memory was in good condition)
Samsung 840 Series 250GB - 900 TB

To the surprise of the author of the experiment, The next disconnected Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB. Upon reaching 1.1 PB, he had only three bad sectors. But soon SMART error messages appeared and the number of bad sectors rose sharply.



The Samsung 840 Pro and the second Kingston HyperX 3K survived.



Samsung 840 Pro gradually accumulated bad sectors: it has already lost 5 GB sectors (1.5 MB each).



But SMART data said there was another 60% reserve for moving sectors.



As for Kingston HyperX 3K, it was easier for him. Thanks to the built-in compression function, less information was written to the flash memory.



By the time of recording 1.5 PB in this drive, only 12 sectors were moved.



Two drives overcame 1.5 PB, showing almost no signs of imminent failure. However, both will be euthanized by overload. The following reviews will tell you how many have stood.

Although six copies are obviously insufficient statistical sampling, but all 6 drives per hundreds of terabytes exceeded the stated operational life. The results showed that modern consumer-grade SSDs have extremely high reliability.

Finally, a few diagrams with performance measurements.