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For those who are curious about what would happen to SSD's longevity after many years, someone's run a real-world torture test of hammering SSDs with tons of data. They're only halfway thru it, having hit the drives with 500TB of writes:

500TB works out to 140GB of writes per day for 10 years. That's an insane amount even for power users, and it far exceeds the endurance specifications of our candidates.

-- GSH

I don't know if that could be considered an objective depiction of the impacts of write endurance since that's measured in isolation of other variables such as external heat and age. I mean since writing nand is basically flipping electrons up and down along an oxide layer, maybe having an electron in a certain place for an extended period of time causes the oxide layer (between the on and off bit positions) or the storage medium to decay and writing simply exascerbates the effect (makes the aging process go faster).

Now up to 600TB written -- the equivalent of "well over 300GB per day for five years"

-- GSH

Life expectancy hasn't really been a problem with most computer hardware I have found, it usually becomes obsolete before it wears out...

MrTwosheds wrote:Life expectancy hasn't really been a problem with most computer hardware I have found, it usually becomes obsolete before it wears out...

Tell that to my many failed hard drives.

I hear that more often, do wonder what those people do with those HD's.
HardDrive does not mean you can drive it hard

Only HD issue I've ever had was when HD's came in 2 digit MB-size where I got a few bad clusters on it. And that was a 2nd hand system I bought for fl75,- (about €30,-).

Not wanting to evoke Murphy (of Murphy's Law) or SOD, I think nobody should talk about hardware that has not gone wrong...

In 15 years of IT work, I think I had less than 10 failed drives... most of them in the mid 90s.

Not counting the one I dropped.

I've had 3 HDs go sour at home in the last 10 years. I'm pretty compulsive about backing things up, so haven't really lost much -- maybe 5-7 private BZ2 betas got lost in one HD outage 5-6 years ago, but could reconstruct their contents from version control.

-- GSH

I've got 2 4TB drives in my tower and 2 3TB externals that I duplicate data around so that I would need to lose two at once to be SoL.

Another good read on SSD reliability. Including a real-life torture test for cosmic radiation, putting SSDs in the path of a particle accelerator. Don't try that one at home, kids.

-- GSH

MrTwosheds wrote:Not wanting to evoke Murphy (of Murphy's Law) or SOD, I think nobody should talk about hardware that has not gone wrong...

So true. And that's serendipitously appropriate here since I still use 98se to play BZE, because my of love for the Logitech Interceptor that can only be fully programmed with non NTFS OS'.

I have a 250mb hard disk from 1997 with 98se still running strong.

Interesting read.

GSH wrote:I've had 3 HDs go sour at home in the last 10 years. I'm pretty compulsive about backing things up, so haven't really lost much -- maybe 5-7 private BZ2 betas got lost in one HD outage 5-6 years ago, but could reconstruct their contents from version control.

-- GSH

Chyeah. You're telling me!

Had a few 'traditional' drives go bust. Not had the SSDs long enough to really vouch; I'd be rather upset if anyp/i] drive broke after a year and a half.

See the latest updates : 3 of the 6 drives failed before the 1 petabyte mark of writes. Three are still going.

Seriously, 1 petabyte is a pretty impressive achievement.

-- GSH