After 1.5 PB, two SSD drives survived

Backblaze engineers updated HDD reliability statistics yesterday. A couple of days before, the results of another interesting experiment became known - on the survival of SSD-drives .

The computer edition of The Tech Report last August began testing SSD-drives. The goal is to check how many rewriting cycles each of six instances sustain. The experiment went on for a year: after recording 1 petabyte , three drives survived , and after 1.5 petabyte, two remained.

At the start of the marathon came Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, Intel 335 Series 240GB, Samsung 840 Series 250GB, Samsung 840 Pro 256GB and two Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB.
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For testing chose the program Storage Utilities from Anvil

As a result, all six drives exceeded the failure rate specified in the technical specifications, and three were able to overcome the petabyte mark.

First losses:
Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB - 728 TB
Intel 335 Series 240GB - 750 TB (voluntarily failed upon reaching the programmed record cycle rate, although the flash memory was in good condition)
Samsung 840 Series 250GB - 900 TB

To the surprise of the author of the experiment, the following turned off the Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB. Upon reaching 1.1 PB, he had only three bad sectors. But soon SMART error messages appeared and the number of bad sectors increased dramatically.



The Samsung 840 Pro and the second Kingston HyperX 3K survived.



Samsung 840 Pro gradually accumulated bad sectors: it has already lost 5 GB sectors (1.5 MB each).



But the SMART data said that there is another 60% reserve for moving sectors.



As for the Kingston HyperX 3K, it had to be easier. Thanks to the built-in compression feature, less information was recorded in the flash memory.



By the time of recording 1.5 PB in this drive, only 12 sectors were moved.



Two drives overcame 1.5 PB, practically showing no signs of a quick failure. However, both of them will be killed by overloading. The following reviews will tell who survived how much.

Although six copies - obviously insufficient statistical sampling, but all 6 drives on hundreds of terabytes exceeded the service life stated in the characteristics. The results showed that modern SSD-drives, even consumer level, have extremely high reliability.

Finally, a few charts with performance measurements.