SSDs reach two petabytes of writes in endurance test

The Samsung 840 Pro and the Kingston HyperX 3K survived two petabytes of writes in a durability test by Tech Report. It’s the last two SSDs that hold up, four other drives struggled with writes of hundreds of terabytes.

Even after writing more than two petabytes, or two thousand terabytes, the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB has no errors that can no longer be repaired. However, there are now 5591 reallocated sectors and the write speed seems to be decreasing slightly, Tech Report notes. The site does not consider it impossible that the SSD will reach three petabytes.

Kingston’s HyperX 3K 240GB actually processed 1.4 petabytes of writes thanks to DuraWrite compression of the SandForce controller. The disk has only 31 reallocated sectors, which equates to errors with only 124 megabytes of flash. However, before reaching 1PB of writes, two irreparable errors appeared. No decrease in writing speed can be observed.

A second HyperX 3K drive stopped functioning after writing 728TB and this drive bypassed compression making the test fairer to the other participants. 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 managed to get rid of a total of 1.2PB of writes before the drive gave up the ghost.

Tech Report wanted to demonstrate the influence of the vulnerability of flash memory with the test. The site notes that all disks have far exceeded the lifespan that the manufacturers stated in their specifications and that the SSDs were able to withstand many more writes than the average user will generate.