SSD Life Expectancy

[Flash]

This YouTube video is a few years old but still good as far as I can tell. I think it applies to all forms of flash memory, such as USB thumb drives, not just SSDs.

[bigpup]

This is very good general information.
Thanks!

Understand the limit is in writes not reads.
Also, in deleting and reusing the space now free.

I have seen testing results where they use SSD's to the point of failure. Those results showed that all the SSD's they tested, went way beyond manufactures stated limits.
And all could still be read, they just no longer would write reliably.
The main point, a home user would take many years to reach this failure limit.
Probably get a new computer, before it failed.
Well, maybe not a Puppy user.


Really no different than disk hard drives, that will fail at some point.

Backup, backup, backup, backup, if it is something you cannot lose!!

[backi]

Good Info ....Thanks !
Find SSD's cheaper (in sense of long term Aspect) and faster than Usb Sticks .
Replaced my (slow) Hard-disk with 125 GB SSD...... did cost me 20 Bucks (Euro)..........good Decision......happy Camper now .

[Flash]

...Really no different than disk hard drives, that will fail at some point.

Backup, backup, backup, backup, if it is something you cannot lose!!

I agree, back it up if you can't afford to lose it, though I'd say that to be as safe as possible, backups should be done on media such as BD-R or DVD-R that can't be erased or altered (except by physical damage to the media, of course.) Backing up onto non-erasable media would prevent someone from encrypting the data and demanding a ransom for the encryption key, or simply erasing the data.

I would say that the expected failure mode of flash memory is functionally different from the well-known catastrophic failure mode of a hard disk drive. Flash memory cells basically wear out. After 100,000 erase-write cycles, give or take, they begin to lose their ability to be written to. Read errors increase to the point that data is lost. However, the data is always combined with error correction bits, so that a few read errors can be corrected. If the memory controller is tracking read errors, there should be plenty of warning that a flash memory is getting near the end of its useful life. In my experience, spinning hard disk drives often fail without warning and in such a way as to make it infeasible to recover the data they contain.

[Mike Walsh]

In reality, as I understand it, those 100,000+ 'writes' (the action that does most of the 'wearing-out') will, for most average users, last your lifetime. NOT the equipment's.....yours.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/1 ... oud-expect

As the memory manufacturers - Samsung, Hynix, Hitachi, Toshiba, et al - develop more & more reliable NAND flash chip designs, those 'lifetime' projections will just keep getting longer and longer.....


Mike.

[p310don]

and yet my SSD died after a couple of years... Completely dead, no life in it at all. I suspect it is probably the controller rather than the memory chips themselves. Didn't have a backup of that one. Bugger.

DVD / BD backups aren't as good as they used to claim. I pulled out some old ones recently, they'd all deteriorated. No good. HDDs die. Flash dies. Everything dies.

Best bet is to back up to multiple sources, including online.

[rcrsn51]

Everything dies.

In Australia's climate these days, I'm not surprised.

[bigpup]

There is M-DISC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

[Mike Walsh]

Re: my post above.

Do be aware that the tests they subjected those SSDs to in the afore-mentioned reliability study are true 'punishment' tests.

Those units are being subjected to 100s of terabytes of writes every single day - day in, day out, month after month. Very few 'average' users are going to be performing those quantities of I/O operations.....not on that kind of scale.

In general terms, reliability is steadily improving, all the time.

p310don was just unlucky with his units, I guess. Chips can still fail at a moment's notice.....and the suspicions about the flash controller chip are probably fairly accurate, at that.


Mike.

[Flash]

True, DVD-R and BD-R will degrade with time. The solution to that is probably to refresh (copy) them every few years. Wasteful, but what else can you do?

[p310don]

Wasteful, but what else can you do?

Good back up routines.

Refresh optical backups.

Have multiple backups across multiple machines / locations.

Any time I've discarded a computer (which hurts), I copy the info off the old onto the new, and then keep the hard drive out of the old in the cupboard. Just in case.

Online backups.

Automated backups.



Having had multiple drives of all kinds fail over the years (often in summer, so rcrscn51 is possibly right) I've come to rationalise my backup priorities. My first drive failure was full of downloaded TV shows. It sucked, but was all replaceable. If it had have been my personal photos, that would have been much worse. It was a great lesson of the fragility of data. Now all my photos go directly to google photos, plus stay on my phone / camera, and I regularly download them to my laptop's hard drive.

At work, I have a computer system with critical data. The original design of the software does a backup within itself automatically every day. On top of that, each day I have two automatic backups that copy all the data off the windows server to my puppy machine, which compresses it all to a tar.gz That file is copied onto another computer (raspberry pi) on the local network, and also uploaded twice daily to a google drive. Further to that, each staff member has a USB flash drive. It is their responsibility to copy that file to their drive before they go home every day. In theory, there should be 4 local versions of the same data, one online and at least 2 on USB sticks.

To add to the data paranoia, I have imaged the windows SSDs using PUDD and have those images saved on the work Puppy machine and on my home PC.