Last ssd gives up ghost after 2.4PB of writes in staminatest
After more than 2.4 petabytes of writes, the Samsung 840 Pro SSD has died in Tech Report’s long standing test. Number two is the Kingston Hyper X 3K SSD. Until his death, he managed to save 2.1PB of data.
The technology website subjected a number of SSDs to an endurance test, continuously writing data to the drives using Anvil’s Storage Utilities. The drives tested were the Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, Intel 335 Series 240GB, Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB, Samsung 840 Series 250GB, and Samsung 840 Pro 256GB.
The Samsung 840 Pro is the most reliable SSD according to Tech Report because the solid state drive did not produce any irreparable errors until the storage device stopped functioning. The number of reallocated sectors allocated, using ‘reserve flash’ to replace exhausted memory cells, also followed a predicted pattern. According to Tech Report’s statistics, the 840 Pro started to use its first reserves after 600TB of writes. After the SSD gave up writes after 2.4PB, 7000 spare sectors had been used, which together accounted for 10.7GB.
The Kingston Hyper X 3K SSD came in second in the marathon test. The SSD only became inaccessible after 2.1PB of writes. However, the solid state drive reported some unrecoverable errors after 1PB of writes, while the number of program errors also increased. However, the Hyper X 3K turned out to be inaccessible after a power failure, although Tech Report states that it is not certain that the interruption is the main cause of the death of the SSD.
The Intel 335 Series gave up after 750TB and the Samsung 840 made it to 900TB, although problems appeared much earlier, including irreparable ones. Corsair’s Neutron GTX got 1.2PB of writes before the drive gave up the ghost.
According to Tech Report, its 18-month stamina test proves that the solid state drives can handle significantly more writes than the average consumer will ever produce. However, the tech site admits that due to the limited amount of SSDs that have been tested, no definitive conclusions can be drawn about the lifespan of the tested drive types. Furthermore, the advice is given to secure data as soon as the first error messages appear, for example from the smart mechanism, because ssds can suddenly die.