Think your SSD will last forever? Google has some answers on that

By Darren Allan

The jostling between SSDs and spinning hard disks is an ongoing process, and some new research from Google has thrown light on the reliability of solid-state drives both in general terms, and compared to traditional HDDs.

The new report, entitled ‘Flash Reliability in Production: The Expected and the Unexpected’, certainly made some interesting discoveries in terms of the latter.

The study, which used 10 different models of drives from Google’s many data centres over “many millions of drive days”, turned up one definitely unexpected nugget – that the age of the drive, rather than the amount of usage it had seen, was the factor which correlated with high error rates.

In other words, heavy usage and wearing flash out isn’t such a problem with today’s SSDs, and their failure is more based upon how long they’ve been in service for. Good news for users or businesses with heavier workloads…

SLC disappointment

Google’s researchers (Raghav Lagisetty and Arif Merchant – who worked in conjunction with Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto) also found there was no evidence that higher-end SLC drives were more reliable than MLC drives (within a typical SSD lifespan).

While SLC drives did perform much better in terms of having far …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components