cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

SSD durability question

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I bought an Intel Postville G2 160GB two weeks ago and I have some questions regarding durability and threshold.

An article in a well-known (german) techie-newspaper told, that Intel specifies a durability limit of 15 Terabytes for a 160GB SSD drive. SMART tells me, that my drive already has written 400GB off that (considering a complete fresh install of Win7 x64 on it). That means 28GB / day or if I try to compensate for the fresh install maybe 15-20GB / Day. That would lead to a durability of almost exactly 2 years (considering 20 GB writes / day).

I'm just wondering: given a nearly perfect wear leveling algorithm, it would require a total of 1.600 Terabytes (1.6 Petabytes) written to the SSD to end its life definetely (given 10.000 write cycles per block). Let's just consider some threshold thingies here and there, threshold bla and reduce that 10k cycles to an average of 1k (!) per block, this still would lead to 160 Terabytes writes being left. Considering my 20 GB/ day, my SSD would be finde for at least 21 years.

Furtheron: let's say, the wear leveling algorithm would NOT re-write existing data due to a "maximum" of wear leveling, so that only free space is available for wear leveling. Let's say, there are only 20% of free space at each time given. that still would lead to 4 years instead of 2.

So this is my question: what durability of my ssd is a realistic guess? Is there any official statement on SSD durability by intel?

3 REPLIES 3

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I have the same questions, but posted them here:

/thread/8107?tstart=0# 8107 http://communities.intel.com/thread/8107?tstart=0# 8107

G2 datasheet:

http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/322296.pdf http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/322296.pdf

From the datasheet, It's 5 years at 20GB/day.

But that is for the 80 GB drive? or for the 160 gb drive?

The 160gb drive should last twice the years than the 80GB drive (at 20GB/day), it has double the space.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I wouldn't worry about the SSD lasting 5 years because I never kept a hdd that long. New technology and such makes me change... It won't be long before SATA 3 hits the shelves.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Yep, I think the same.

Probably it's 5 years for the 80gb and 10 years for the 160gb at 20GB/day.

We can also buy 2x80GB for the same price as one 160gb and also have 10 years at 20GB/day