[PLUG] question on NAND solid state drives lifetime

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 07:04, Russell Johnson <russ at dimstar.net> wrote:

> writing to a new 64GB ssd at max speed continuously would still require your app to run for 51 years before it would hit the ssd limit designed into the drive... and fall over.

I didn't do the math recently, but around a year ago when i did it was
something like that--ridiculously improbable that you'd still be using
the media by the time it failed (though i still have some 15 year old
hard drives, i haven't used any of them in at least 10 years...and no
longer have a computer with the appropriate ancient scsi connector to
do so if i wanted to.)

first off, the drives are pretty smart about spreading writes around
the drive rather than leaving hotspots pinned to a certain sector.
but even if it is pinned to a spot that exceeds the write limit, these
drives also typically have some reserved percentage above their listed
capacity to migrate failing sectors to, and they notice the failure
when it happens and do so automatically under the hood so you don't
even ever become affected by it, except that maybe the write takes an
extra few milliseconds to complete.