Endurance Test of Samsung 850 Pro Comes To an End after 9100TB of writes
Yes, so that is 9.1 Petabyte of data written! Good lord. The German colleagues from c't (print magazine) have ended their SSD endurance tests after the last SSD decided to go belly up.
That last SSD of the survivors was the Samsung 850 Pro, and it had written an astounding 9100 TB of data, yep 9,100,000 Gigabytes. That particular SSD is rated for 150 TB written and now is three years old.
c't used six SSDs of each model: OCZ TR150, Crucial BX 200, Samsung 750 Evo, Samsung 850 Pro, SanDisk Extreme Pro and SanDisk Ultra II. Conclusive was the fact that all SSDs lasted way longer then advertised. The two SSDs that failed first where a Crucial BX200 , which lasted twice the number of advertised writes at 187 and 280 TB. Then also a number of SSDs died after a accident that caused a power surge or peak (could not understand it really well as the original article is written in German). The top batch became the SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung 850 Pro models, they all lasted a minimum of 2.2 Petabyte.
A normal office system writes between 10 and 35 GB per day. Even if you had a generous 40 GB per day, a nominal endurance of 70 TBW would be achieved after five years. Now if we extrapolate that data and take it to the Samsung SSD 850 that would be 60 times the guaranteed write performance of 150 TBW. At that average of 40-gigabyte daily usage, (purely theoretical of course) that SSD would have lasted 623 years.
No matter what this articles indicates, Guru3D recommend you to always backup your data.
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Pretty sure hat you can remember back to when a consumer would have had a hard time wraping their head around a terabyte. Now a peta byte is-a-coming, to be an everyday phrase to toss around. Glad you found the article.
Its always interesting to get hard data from what is still a relatively new technology. I can add this to another -online- test that showed additional impressive life reserves. More than stated, by a significant margin.
Possibly you can help me get my head around what "bytes" written means. I understand the concept. But if I install a game, lets say a terabyte in size, how many "bytes" were written? Better question, using the knowledge that you have about how games are made: textures vs engine vs executables, of the 1Tb game, how many "bytes" would you feel would be written on the loading and playing of said game for an hour?
Info to better get my head around what affects the longevity of an ssd even though its a much more comfortable place since all of the longevity data has come out.
Any time data is written to, moved around, temporarily cached on an SSD, it counts towards "total bytes written" TBW of the SSD.
NAND flash cells can only be written a finite(but obviously overly pessimistic based on the demonstrated endurance) number of times.
You also have to take into account write amplification, which has to do with how data is written. You could actually end up writing a lot more data to the drive than the file size indicates. Keep in mind that an OS will usually be doing small amounts of reads and writes in the background at all times, and playing a game does a bunch of reads and possibly writes depending on the game and what it decides to page to the SSD.
Heres a good place to start
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-amplification
http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/ssd-over-provisioning-benefits-master-ti/
http://www.thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/beginners-guide/
I have a Crucial SSD that supports their Momentum Cache, which essentially lets me use 4GB of my system RAM as a cache to prevent a lot of unnecessary random writes, and i also enabled 10% overprovisioning beyond the SSDs 12GB standard setting since i have a 1TB drive and can use the OP to increase theoretical endurance.
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"A normal office system writes between 10 and 35 GB per day. ""
What is a normal office, that somehow writes that much data per day?
take a look on task manager -> performance -> drive activity
there many things writing in background
windows/apps/program, browser, stream (youtube/netflix) cache
do u think a drive only writing when u saving some data/files to it ?
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Sammy 950 PRO. Looking good?



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I just paid 296 Euro for an 8TB HDD...
Choosing 4x 2TB Samsung 850 EVO's (as cheap as possible without sacrificing too much on quality), that would cost from the same seller: 2636 Euro
I don't see them covering the NINE times price difference in the next 3-5 years. HDD's of similar capacity will drop in price as well during that time.
There are other technologies in development as well, although they are likely the potential successors to NAND. In the meantime, mechanical HDD's still have potential in much larger sizes using HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) for example.
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"A normal office system writes between 10 and 35 GB per day. ""
What is a normal office, that somehow writes that much data per day?
Do not underestimate the web cache of the everday procrastinator who has access to business class internet speeds.