Have Hard Drives Become Obsolete??? - Page 4

lavalamp · 2019-08-27, 02:56

There was some discussion on facebook (I know, I know) about MLC vs TLC/QLC drives. I just posted this on there, but thought it could be interesting to people here too.

I have a pair of 512GB SSDs that for most of their life have been in RAID-0, so essentially a 1 TB drive.

According to the SMART data the *average* erase count is 285. Sadly this drive doesn't report min and max numbers, but on a newer drive that does report such things, the max is double the average erase count. So there are probably cells on these drives that have over 500 erase cycles.

Sticking with the average though, that means I've written 285 TB to these drives. Over 4 years that's almost 200 GB / day.

Let's see how newer drives would perform under such circumstances. The Crucial BX500 960GB has an endurance of 240 TBW, oops, that'd be completely dead by now. Every single cell.

The Samsung 860 QVO 1TB has an endurance of 360 TBW, aha, so it would be fine! Well not quite, at this point there would dead cells and so it would be losing capacity as more and more cells reach end of life.

According to the SMART data my MLC drives have 91% remaining life.

In my opinion these newer drives that only have a couple hundred erase cycles will be fine for file storage, game libraries and maybe as the OS drive for people who treat their computer as a facebook and email machine. But for my OS drive give me MLC.

I should also mention I keep my page file on a mechanical HDD, I honestly wonder how much higher the usage would have been if I did not.

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2019-08-27, 02:56	#34
lavalamp Oct 2007 Manchester, UK 5³·11 Posts	There was some discussion on facebook (I know, I know) about MLC vs TLC/QLC drives. I just posted this on there, but thought it could be interesting to people here too. I have a pair of 512GB SSDs that for most of their life have been in RAID-0, so essentially a 1 TB drive. According to the SMART data the average erase count is 285. Sadly this drive doesn't report min and max numbers, but on a newer drive that does report such things, the max is double the average erase count. So there are probably cells on these drives that have over 500 erase cycles. Sticking with the average though, that means I've written 285 TB to these drives. Over 4 years that's almost 200 GB / day. Let's see how newer drives would perform under such circumstances. The Crucial BX500 960GB has an endurance of 240 TBW, oops, that'd be completely dead by now. Every single cell. The Samsung 860 QVO 1TB has an endurance of 360 TBW, aha, so it would be fine! Well not quite, at this point there would dead cells and so it would be losing capacity as more and more cells reach end of life. According to the SMART data my MLC drives have 91% remaining life. In my opinion these newer drives that only have a couple hundred erase cycles will be fine for file storage, game libraries and maybe as the OS drive for people who treat their computer as a facebook and email machine. But for my OS drive give me MLC. I should also mention I keep my page file on a mechanical HDD, I honestly wonder how much higher the usage would have been if I did not.