Consumer SSD endurance

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Diavuno

Active Member
So I'm always looking up SSD endurance ratings before purchase.

Should I really even bother? I'm cleaning up my desktop (840EVO) and thought I should check the writes.
I'm at a whopping 7.18Tb Writes, seems like a good amount for a little consumer 250GB model... but supposedly they are good for nearly a PB!?!

Now when I upgrade mechanical drives to SSD I'll typically use 250GB Trion100s or 850Pros
The Trion is a budget drive rated at 55GB/D or 60TB total.
The Samsung is rated 1.5x the daily and 2.5x the total writes.

suddenly my 840's 7TB seems to be nothing. (this model rated at 70TB total)

Then I ran some performance tests.
How have you seen total writes impact performance? of course a new SSD and fresh install of your OS will be amazing, but at 3 or 4 years old install with 7 TB writes It's fast, but not "FAST!"


Do you think it;s worth looking at endurance on modern SSD's (for consumers/basic workstations)
What are your thoughts on writes/performance?
What is your SSD's Total writes? how does it feel Vs new?
 

T_Minus

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If it's feeling slow do a secure erase it should come back to life... that's been my experience at-least w/drives not 'completely worn out'.

I seem to replace my desktop SSD every 1 - 1.5 years so I normally only have a couple TBW on them.

For most consumers I don't think it matters but I never use the cheap cheap drives myself.
 

Deslok

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What OS is the 840 on? I don't think windows 7 has TRIM support, the 840 was known to slow down with cold data as well I belive a firmware update resolved this. I don't typically worry about the enduance unless I know someone has a workload that could have an abnormal amount of writes(like video editing and other content creation) although perhaps I should have looked at it on my own I seem to go through ~20TB/year on my laptop drive(download lots of ISO images to move to the storage server, test hyper-v vm's before moving them to the cluster) but even there I'm rated for something like 150TBW I doubt I'll have kept the laptop/drive for 7 years.
 

xnoodle

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Windows 7 had trim automatically enabled if you installed directly to a SSD. If you imaged a HDD installation, you would need to enable it via fsutil.
 

KioskAdmin

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For 99% of consumer workloads today's SSDs have plenty of write endurance. Even for most server workloads if we're being honest with ourselves.
 

gigatexal

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have you read the tech report's thing on consumer drive endurance? basically consumer drives on the whole last a lot longer than their rated lifespans and for me means, at least for my lab, they're good for pseudo-production/server/heavy duty work as well even with the non-powerless protection
 

T_Minus

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have you read the tech report's thing on consumer drive endurance? basically consumer drives on the whole last a lot longer than their rated lifespans and for me means, at least for my lab, they're good for pseudo-production/server/heavy duty work as well even with the non-powerless protection
The endurance via a consumer desktop is mostly copying files and thus they last longer due to "ok now we're writing a big file" ok now we're taking a break and then a couple hours, days, etc... later doing that again.

The endurance via a "lab pseudo-production/server/heavy duty work" when we're talking about VMs, databases, logging, and other multi-use type patterns 'utilize' the SSD drastically different.

A mixed work load on Enterprise drives often brings them to <50% their "rated" IOPs performance levels, and for consumer drives this is often 5-15% their "rated" performance levels. Throw this work-load on most/cheap consumer drives and after a few weeks/months the drives will perform even less, and won't catch back up due to their different garbage collection/clean-up/reserve space etc...

From what I've seen you can get by with 850 Pro and the Sandisk Extreme by OPing them a good amount (25%) but I don't consider those cheap consumer drives. Next level would be the 850 EVO OP'd 25-30%, and then I'm sure there are others you can do it with.

BUT, with the price of S3500 I don't see a reason to go ultra-cheap on consumer drives at all.
(Unless you had some you wanted to use.)

What i'm getting at is endurance is only 1 piece of the puzzle nowdays when using these @home lab :)

My 02 at-least :)
 

gigatexal

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Low end 3500s have such terrible write iops which are the ones I could afford based on me wanting a few terabytes of usable space. Though I don't disagree with you on the other parts I think depending on your bar you could get by with "consumer grade" hardware.
 

T_Minus

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Low end 3500s have such terrible write iops which are the ones I could afford based on me wanting a few terabytes of usable space. Though I don't disagree with you on the other parts I think depending on your bar you could get by with "consumer grade" hardware.
Hmm... 2 things.

You're concerned about the intel enterprise drive write but saying consumer would be better... that's likely the case with the 850 PRO or Sandisk Extreme both of which cost more than the used S3500... and likely not many other drives on the consumer world can hold up after 100+ min at the s3500 perf. level.

2nd is you're not likely going to use 1 of any drive in a home lab, at-least RAID10 / pool of mirrors with 4 drives, so you're IOPs isn't limited to a 'single drive' rating.

The 850 EVO 1 and 2TB random-write steady state IOPs is around 9,000 (single drive).
Source:
Samsung 850 Evo And 850 Pro 2TB SSD Review - Introduction

The S3500 480GB steady state is around 15,000 which is an improvement over the 850 drive 2x it's capacity, not to mention at 100MIN or less it's still pumping 25k IOPs
Source:
Intel SSD DC S3500 Enterprise Review | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

The S3500 is far from a 'write' drive as we know, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as you think it is especially compared to consumer drives in the same work load.

It's actually very very affordable to get a lot of reliable performance out of S3500 drives, especially when you're going with a good sized pool of mirrors :)

I'd urge you to evaluate your need of a "few terabytes" of high write needs, that seems extremely excessive for a home lab. Just my 02 on that, no need to pay extra $$ for something if it doesn't need it. Either way, I think the S3500 will surprise you :)

(At $85/300GB S350 for $850 you get 3TB raw space that's a rather great deal for enterprise class storage.)
 

T_Minus

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The biggest thing for me was that the benchmarks/rating for Enterprise and Consumer are not done the same by the manufacturers so it may give the impression the consumer is faster when it's not 'consistently', but only for a short burst.
 
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Deslok

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An lsi based sas6 card shouldn't be too bad, like a Dell h200 if you aren't doing a ton with it. If you want to do tests get smaller drives you'll see changes faster that way, I know there was an endurance test that included an 840 pro that died after more than a petabyte of data.
 

Robrecht

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I have 3 840EVO's with +80Tb total written ( avg. 120GB/day) which are running on the old firmware, when i'm updating them, i'll try to benchmark them before/after if anyone is interested.
 
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Deslok

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This is the report I was looking for, the 840 series TLC drive made it to 900TB worth of data before dying, really every drive they tested went well past it's intended write capacity with the 840 pro hitting 2.4PB before finally kicking the bucket, These were all retail samples and although not necessarily indicative of every drives performance at least interesting results.
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead
 
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gigatexal

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This is the report I was looking for, the 840 series TLC drive made it to 900TB worth of data before dying, really every drive they tested went well past it's intended write capacity with the 840 pro hitting 2.4PB before finally kicking the bucket, These were all retail samples and although not necessarily indicative of every drives performance at least interesting results.
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead
Yes that's the report I was talking about a few posts up.
 

Deslok

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Yes that's the report I was talking about a few posts up.
It's why I'm confident in 2tb 850 pro's for my Camera system as the first write for the security system I built. It's not going to burn those out for the next 30 years, I doubt SATAIII will still be a thing by then XD