Sounds about right. I get to 21.38 TB of write activity over 3 years.

robertmo wrote:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid- … cification.html […]
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http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid- … cification.html

Minimum Useful Life/Endurance Rating: 3 years
The SSD will have a minimum of three years of useful life under typical client workloads with up to 20 GB of host writes per day.

Sorry but this means:
my hdd is 240gb/20gb/day=12days

356days*3years=1068days
1068days/12days=89 times the disk can be written!

They guarantee each cell can be written 89 times???
wtf??? this is nothing!!!

Those numbers are total hogwarsh and just something they are writing to avoid returns. Real life tests shows something completely different.

A user on a Norwegian website is stress testing first generation SSDs, and here is his results so far:

DEAD:
Crucial M4 - 768.5687 TiB written. 2749 hours.
Kingston V 100 - 368.6335 TiB written in 2343 hours.
Intel X25-M G1 80GB - 883.46 TiB written in 6944 hours. (Speed slowed considerable down on this one)

Still Running:
Intel X25-E
1.58 PiB written. Average speed since the last update 71.18 MiB / s SSD is tested (5590-30) 5560 hours. MD5 check OK.

Crucial m4
2110.8663 TiB written. Average speed since the last update on 68.44 MiB / s SSD is tested in 8769 hours. MD5 check OK.

Thats why you only need the SSD for the system.
Plus newer SATA and SAS drives are more than enough.

A friend bought a brand new Seagate Constellation 1TB SATA 3.0 6Gb/s for 40 euro. Guy even gave him 5 SATA cables with it.
Much cheaper, more reliable.

vetz wrote:

A user on a Norwegian website is stress testing first generation SSDs.

You mean this: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthrea … ce-25nm-Vs-34nm ?

Another torture test here http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/4177/hardware … pdate-29-5-2013 (Dutch)

by your logic, using the drives in a raid will extend their life by the number of drives in a array.

granted, if you are writing equally across all 4 drives, but over time I would wager you will.

luckybob wrote:

by your logic, using the drives in a raid will extend their life by the number of drives in a array.

granted, if you are writing equally across all 4 drives, but over time I would wager you will.

Isn't the point of a RAID to have identical copies on all your drives so you have backups in case one fails? So whenever one drive is modified, they all get modified so they would all have the same number of writes.

sliderider wrote:

luckybob wrote:

by your logic, using the drives in a raid will extend their life by the number of drives in a array.

granted, if you are writing equally across all 4 drives, but over time I would wager you will.

Isn't the point of a RAID to have identical copies on all your drives so you have backups in case one fails? So whenever one drive is modified, they all get modified so they would all have the same number of writes.

Yes and No, there are many different RAID array settings:

RAID 0 = Striping, balls to the wall speed, no data backup/recovery.

RAID 1 = Mirroring, this is where you have data backup between the mirrored drives.

RAID 5/6 = Mirroring + Striping + Parity, this is the ideal solution when using multiple HDD's.

Funny thing is that Toms Hardware did exactly this for SSD'd, attempted to RAID 0 for speed to test out in real world apps, only DB apps where you need high/very-high I/O speeds did it really make a difference.

It all comes down to the quality of the nand cells and how large the process they used (NM). The newer drives barely sustain 10k read/write per cell before there being bad cells but with the newer controllers and vastly larger capacities modern SSD drives can last. I prefer older SLC drives as they can handle up to 100k cycles before there is any cell failure but the controllers are not as great.

I used a older 30GB Kingston ssd for the page file under vista for almost two years before it finally started to give up the ghost for a total of maybe 4,500 to 6,000 hours of heavy use.

is there any tools to report how many minimum write cyles are remaining?
its nice to know when the SSD will be dead, so you can prepares another one in timely fashion.

Joey_sw wrote:

is there any tools to report how many minimum write cyles are remaining?
its nice to know when the SSD will be dead, so you can prepares another one in timely fashion.

Most of this is handled automatically by the SSD's firmware, there is always a certain amount of over-provisioning so spare memory cells get mapped into place to replace failed ones.

Then there are those vendors that take a 256GB SSD and make it a 240GB model for this purpose too, even more over-provisioning.

I myself have not come across any tools to show me this info, it would be interesting to run as a systray applet.

Some drives have a toolbox app available that interprets the SMART info and you can see lifetime related data in that. Intel, Samsung and OCZ do have such utils for example. I haven't bothered to look and see if the SMART data is similar across SSDs.

Anyway I have years old Vertex 2 drives with 100% lifetime ratings. You really have to pound a SSD hard to wear it out. Not typical desktop workload.

Joey_sw wrote:

is there any tools to report how many minimum write cyles are remaining?
its nice to know when the SSD will be dead, so you can prepares another one in timely fashion.

There is this, whatever its real worth.

why some movies save into my temp folder even though i have my browser's disk cache turned off? for example this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdLBXWNYUqE
while other movies don't.

EDIT:
It looks it starts without writing, but starts when you switch resolution.

Any way to force it to stop even after res change?

EDIT2:
Will just use youtube downloader. downloads faster and can play it in normal player (with speed up/fforward etc) 😉

I remember when the high-end Intel X25-E 50nm SLC based SSD's came out years ago. 32GB and 64GB. They went for $700 or so. I just picked one up on eBay for under $100. Along with a IDE/SATA adapter, I figure this would potentially outlive the hard drive in my BX chipset Win98 box. I wanted the old school 50nm SLC because the number of writes will be very low (even though it can handle a bazillion writes) and because the refresh of static data will be nill. Since I can't defrag, the cells of my DOS games will never ever change.

Maybe this forum will still be around in 10 years - maybe not - but I figure this box will be the true test of data retention longevity. After all, it doesn't get turned on that often. The only other thing to worry about now are the caps on the motherboard.

I'm a heavy proponent for SSDs and have lots of experience to back it up.

My longest running SSD and also the one running the computer being used to write this is a fairly old Samsung 256GB. According to SMART it has a "Power On Hours Count" of 23386, or about 2.6 years.

SSDs I own and/or have owned:
Samsung 256GB x1 (MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB)
Transcend 32GB x6
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB x1
OCZ Vertex 4 256GB x2
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB x1

I won't lie and say that everything has been perfect; there have been some hiccups along the way but nothing I couldn't one-up with a more colorful story about a mechanical drive.

That being said, they are still expensive but considerably less so than they used to be. I still have the vast majority of my data on mechanical drives though. I hope prices come down enough to convert entirely to SSD.. maybe in another 15-20 years or so.

BTW: Anyone remember how I decided not to go with an SSD in my new rig? Well, it's been several months now and I'm STILL not seeing any point to having an SSD. Loading times under Windows 8 are continuing to cruise along really fast despite having a third of my 1 TB WD Black HDD full. It takes 1 to 3 seconds to go between different areas in Skyrim, including outdoor environments, I can load my video editing software in about 4 seconds, and it still only takes 45 seconds to go from POST to fully able to run programs. (Excepting anything that needs to connect to the internet. For some reason, it takes a couple moments longer to establish a network connection, possibly because I had to replace my WiFi card with a USB WiFi device.)

But yeah, at least with Windows 8 and a good HD/CPU combo, I'm not seeing any real delays in anything OS related that would make me want things that take only 1 or 2 seconds to go even faster. :P

Thing is Gemini, when you first go SSD, you won't go back. It has to be experienced. I haven't met a single person who would like to go back to a mechanical drive as system disk after doing the switch.

My new laptop at work came with a regular harddrive and I'm begging my boss to get a SSD installed.

vetz wrote:

Thing is Gemini, when you first go SSD, you won't go back.

Yes, exactly. The problem isn't so much the throughout as it is the random access latency. If you are only doing one thing at a time, such as a game, you probably won't notice any difference.

However, try to do another task with a high throughput operation (long sustained) or a highly randomized copy (lots of small scattered files) and you will notice that it will be VERY difficult to interact with the machine.

I had an opportunity this week to swap out my 512GB SSD with a 512GB Seagate HDD (brand new!) for some testing. It wasn't that noticeable moving from HDD to SSD but after having been on SSDs for so long, having to move back and realizing all of the things you CAN'T do is extremely jarring.

I've been tainted. SSDs for life.