Endurance SSD Test: 1 petabyte write

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 withstand. The experiment continues to this day: after recording 1 petabyte, three drives remained alive .


For testing, we chose the Anvil Storage Utilities program. The

performance of the surviving drives has not decreased much. In general, these models are not as interesting as the pathogenesis of deceased “patients”. All of them, shortly before their death, began to work a little slower, but they broke down for various reasons.

The Intel 335 Series 240GB and Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB drives gave numerous warnings about an imminent failure, although at the very end they completely stopped responding to external stimuli.

But the Samsung 840 240GB, which uses the more fragile TLC NAND flash memory, died without warning, except for crashes. He suffered during the period of operation due to failures of individual memory cells and numerous fatal errors. 900 TB were recorded on it, while 119 of 295 unrecoverable errors occurred between 800 and 900 TB, and almost all the others were in the region of 300 TB, that is, after a test to save data without power for several days.



All three dead SSDs completed work in a state where it was impossible to recover data from them. In particular, the Intel drive went into read-only mode, and after turning the power off and on, activated something like a self-destruct procedure and completely failed (perhaps this was due to an attempt to write to a disk that is in read-only mode). It was still defined by the driver, but only as a 0GB SATA device.

Although six copies are obviously insufficient statistical sampling, but all of them exceeded the declared service life by hundreds of terabytes. In particular, each managed to record more than 700 TB. This proves the very high reliability of modern SSD consumer segment. The performance of drives that continue to work after a petabyte is even more admiring: these are the Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, Samsung 840 Pro 256GB and the second copy of Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB (with data compression).

Due to the built-in data compression, Kingston HyperX 3K recorded a total of 716 TB of recorded data, although a petabyte was sent to it. There are no failures yet: only two displaced sectors.



Corsair Neutron GTX, according to the built-in Toolbox utility and the “SSD life left” indicator, generally feels like new.



The Tech Report promises to bring to death the remaining three drives and tell how they died.



By the way, a few years ago, Google published statistics on the failure of the HDD in its data centers. It follows that the occurrence of failures is not related to the amount of information recorded on the disk, but it positively correlates with the number of starts and stops of the disk and negatively correlates with temperature: the colder, the more often failures occur.