SSDs are pretty awesome. They're fast enough to provide a palpable improvement in overall system responsiveness and affordable enough that even budget rigs can get in on the action. Without moving parts, SSDs also tolerate rough handling much better than mechanical drives, making them particularly appealing for mobile devices. That's a pretty good all-around combination.
Despite the perks, SSDs have a dirty little secret. Their flash memory may be inherently robust, but it's also fundamentally weak. Writing data erodes the nano-scale structure of the individual memory cells, imposing a ceiling on drive life that can be measured in terabytes. Solid-state drives are living on borrowed time. The question is: how much?
Drive makers typically characterize lifespans in total bytes written. Their estimates usually range from 20-40GB per day for the length of the three- or five-year warranty. However, based on user accounts all over the web, those figures are fairly conservative. They don't tell us what happens to SSDs as they approach the end of the road, either.
Being inquisitive types, we've decided to seek answers ourselves. We've concocted a long-term test that will track a handful of modern SSDs—the Corsair Neutron Series GTX, Intel 335 Series, Kingston HyperX 3K, and Samsung 840 and 840 Pro Series—as they're hammered with an unrelenting torrent of data over the coming weeks and months. And we won't stop until they're all dead. Welcome to the SSD Endurance Experiment.
As this news is very long, I invite you to continue reading here : http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment
Despite the perks, SSDs have a dirty little secret. Their flash memory may be inherently robust, but it's also fundamentally weak. Writing data erodes the nano-scale structure of the individual memory cells, imposing a ceiling on drive life that can be measured in terabytes. Solid-state drives are living on borrowed time. The question is: how much?
Drive makers typically characterize lifespans in total bytes written. Their estimates usually range from 20-40GB per day for the length of the three- or five-year warranty. However, based on user accounts all over the web, those figures are fairly conservative. They don't tell us what happens to SSDs as they approach the end of the road, either.
Being inquisitive types, we've decided to seek answers ourselves. We've concocted a long-term test that will track a handful of modern SSDs—the Corsair Neutron Series GTX, Intel 335 Series, Kingston HyperX 3K, and Samsung 840 and 840 Pro Series—as they're hammered with an unrelenting torrent of data over the coming weeks and months. And we won't stop until they're all dead. Welcome to the SSD Endurance Experiment.
As this news is very long, I invite you to continue reading here : http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment
