The SSD Endurance Experiment
Lee Hutchinson (via Shawn King):
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.
If you haven’t been following along with our endurance experiment, this introductory article is a good starting point. It spends far more time detailing our test methods and system configurations than the brief primer we’ll provide here.
The premise is straightforward. Flash memory has limited endurance, so we’re writing data to a stack of SSDs to see how much they can take. We’re checking health and performance at regular intervals, and we’re not going to stop until all the drives are dead.
