The Tech Report have been running an ‘SSD Endurance Experiment’ utilising consumer SSDs to see how long they last and what their ‘real world’ endurance is really. It seem that pretty much all of the drive are very good and last longer than their manufacturers state; a fairly unusual state of affairs that!! Something in IT that does better than it states on the can.
The winner is Samsung 840 Pro that manages more than 2.4 Pb of data before it dies!
This is great news for consumers but there are some gotchas; it seems that most drives when they finally fail, they fail hard and leave your data inaccessible; some of the drives’ software happily states they are healthy right up until the day they fail.
A lot of people assume that when SSDs fail and reach their end of life for writes; the data on them will still be readable; it seems that this might not be the case with the majority of drives. You are going to need decent backups.
What does this mean for the flash array market? Well, in general it appears to be pretty good news and that those vendors who are using consumer-grade SSD are pretty much vindicated. But…it does show that managing and monitoring the SSDs in those arrays is going to be key. Software as per usual is going to be king!
A much larger scale test needs to be done before we can be 100% certain and it’d be good if some of the array vendors were to release their experiences around the life of consumer drives that they are using in their arrays.
Still if I was running a large server estate and was looking at putting SSDs in them; I probably would now think twice before forking out a huge amount of cash on eMLC and would be looking at the higher-end consumer drives.
