Interesting article on SSDs wearing out

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timmmay

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#147365 17-Jun-2014 13:21

The Samsung drives do well, the pro a bit better than the standard model. Corsair and Kingston models do very well. They all manage to get through 500TB of writes with no data loss, which is pretty impressive - you'd be very hard pressed to ever do that with an SSD. My first SSD failed suddenly with no warning though.

http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

It's also interesting to learn about the SMART data, and what it means. I have a utility that reads the information but that doesn't help since it's not well explain anywhere.

Laworder

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#1068084 18-Jun-2014 06:22

Thats interesting - have just had a Samsung Pro 128GB fail after just 7 months in my little ultrabook. Its being replaced under warranty. Wasnt using it for anything more than surfing and playing music and working on Dropbox documents. Thing worked brilliantly.... until it didnt. ultrabook just started freezing while playing music, then screen blacked out, then a BSOD a minute later. Restarted, check disk ran and spent an hour correcting errors, then Windows started, BSOD again. Then BSOD every time I tried to restart it even in Safe mode.

Its at the shop, I havent heard back yet. Apparently the bigger SSD's are more resilient, so told them that if they cant get another 128 I am happy for them to install a 240/250 and pay for the difference, am getting another 4GB RAM installed so I can run the page files in RAM rather than on the disk, that also helps as the page files are where the majority of write cycles occur.

I hope its just a one off failure/ bad luck, fortunately there was no crucial data lost, I keep copies, and Dropbox is also a godsend in situations like this

Regards
Peter

timmmay

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#1068091 18-Jun-2014 07:13

SSDs do have a tendency to die suddenly, rather than slowly like regularly disks. My 64GB OWC Sandforce based SSD died much like yours. I personally doubt it was the flash, I suspect a malfunctioning controller chip.

Larger drives do wear out more slowly because of wear leveling, it has more space to put things so doesn't have to reuse the same cells all the time.

Having more RAM will reduce the amount of paging, but you can't exactly "put your page file in memory" unless you set up a RAM disk - which isn't commonly done these days. Good move to get more RAM though.