Almost a year ago, The Tech Report set out to answer a question: Exactly how much hammering could modern SSDs take? The site put together a comprehensive stress test that would hammer the drives with a variety of data, commit hundreds of terabytes of writes, and then continue using the drives until they died. This week, the experiment crossed the petabyte line — or at least three of the original drives (down from six) did.
Tech Report’s test set of six drives was never large enough to draw conclusions about which SSDs were more reliable; the goal was to analyze how the drives would fail, how many terabytes of writes they could sustain, and what the failure modes would look like. Would they drop out gracefully with plenty of warning time, or would they calamitously collapse?
You should take a look at the details of the study, but in short the results are quite encouraging. Of the six SSDs they started off with (all consumer models), three have died. All three lasted hundreds of TB beyond their rated maximum, including the TLC NAND drive. The Samsung 840 began showing errors and replacing blocks with spare storage held in reserve long before any of the MLC drives, but that’s precisely why Samsung designed these drives to contain a larger pool of reserve storage in the first place.
Even better, all of the drives that died gave ample warning before actually kicking the bucket, alerting the user with pop-up message on the desktop.
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