Endurance Test Shows Your SSD Might Have Legs to Last 1,000 Years

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Examining the lifespan of SSDs

Solid state storage (SSD) drives are relative newcomers to the storage scene compared to media like mechanical hard disk drives. So the question remains, are SSDs reliable? Barring a time machine and enough plutonium to keep it running, it's a tough question to answer. In the absence of a DoLorean equipped to race back and forth in time, the next best way to test SSDs for endurance is to bombard them with writes. Turns out such a test is taking place with two SSDs having survived 2 petabytes of write tests so far.
The curious folk at TechReport started endurance testing a batch of SSDs a year ago. They started off with SSDs from the Corsair Neutron Series GTX, Intel 335 Series, Kingston HyperX 3K, and Samsung 840 Series. The two that are left standing are the Kingston and Samsung drives, both of which have surpassed 2 petabytes of writes and are still going strong.
To give you an idea of longevity, most consumer SSDs will process up to a couple of terabytes every few years. To write 2 petabytes of data under normal use scenarios, you'd be looking at about 1,000 years.
Luck of the draw plays a factor, as TechReport's first HyperX 3K SSD died after reaching 728TB. Nevertheless, that's a lot of data, and like the other four drives that died during the endurance test, it "vastly" exceeded its official endurance specifications.
"More importantly, the drives all survived far more writes than most users are likely to generate. Typical consumers shouldn't worry about exceeding the endurance of modern SSDs," TechReport writes.
Granted, this is just one test and the sample size is pretty small to draw definitive conclusions from, but the results are certainly promising.
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