SSD Endurance
For those of you that don’t think SSDs are durable enough, it’s just because hard drive manufacturers tried to scare people with the whole limited writes thing.
TechReport is still running their enduance test, and there are 2 still going after 2 PB of writes. Yes, 2 petabytes, or the equivalent of over-writing a 512GB SSD in its entirety 4000 times.
If you’ve got questions, just buy a samsung 840 Pro on clearance and don’t worry about it until you replace your computer twice.
Its interesting.
But no large conclusions can be drawn from a tiny data set. They would really need to do this test on hundreds of drives across tens of brands to be conclusive.
6 data points should be taken as interesting, but not factual.
Who cares man. If it works, it works. If anyone argues against SSD, take an SSD and an oldschool HD, drop them each 20 feet onto concrete, and plug them both in. Which one still works?
is there a TL;DR version that someone can tell us?
People complain about the theoretically limited write endurance of SSDs because they can’t read technical reports. I’m guessing it was exacerbated by hard drive manufacturers posting/writing about it in a desperate attempt to say relevant.
They ignore the fact that hard drives are susceptible to something similar because it was never widely publicized.
And somebody took some SSDs and ran an endurance test out of a small sample. All of them lasted longer than the manufacturer said they would, some by many times more than anyone would ever write to one outside of a test lab.
Yes, the sample size is small, but…uhh…the chances that these drives are close to average performance is a lot greater than the chance that they’re many times more durable than average.
You have nowhere near enough data to make that claim. Youre basing those chances on literally nothing. 
I know what you are getting at, but hard drives need to be assessed in the thousands if you want to make claims about failure rates. The fact that a hard drive of any make and model can fail at any time means you have to have a large sample size.
That wont prove anything except which one smashes better. Any hard drive can fail at any time.
I read that 5 years of average use is about right. Pretty much the same as a shitty old HDD.
“From the data I’ve seen, client SSD annual failure rates under warranty tend to be around 1.5%, while HDDs are near 5%”
Damn, I’ve gotten 10+ years out of most of my HDD. Only had one die on me.
Still, an interesting test that I’ll read more about over my morning joe.
Even better
No, I’m basing it on assuming that drive longevity, failures, and performance are normally distributed.
If the true average was the two to three years of normal use, even making very generous assumptions about what “normal use” means (say 5TB/year), that a lot of fear mongers claim, the fact that one exists that can do that much better means that for any even halfway reasonable estimate of standard deviation (e.g., twice the average, which is mathematically impossible), it’s a lot more likely that the fear mongers are wrong than that the drives they’re testing are that exceptional.
You can draw broad conclusions based off small samples, and the broad conclusion this implies is that most of the fear mongering about SSDs is just plain wrong.
THe argument is no moving parts vs. moving parts. Ive gone through about 6 hard drives in an 8 year period due to just throwing laptops around at gigs. Since switching to solid state two years ago… no issues.
For my desktop I have a 500GB standard and a tb solid state. The standard is about 6 years old and still runs like new.
As always I find your thoughts interesting, but this is all just your opinion to be honest.
If you would like to draw that conclusion, then its up to you, but its not something Id base a large scale purchasing decision on.
You cant draw any conclusion from 6 hard drives. Its meaningless in a statistical sense. Thats superstition, not evidence.
You’re probably right. But, we’re not talking about large scale purchasing decisions. We’re talking about individuals on a DJ forum. Apart form you, I probably own as many or more drives than 90% of DJTT users.
And, yes, it’s my opinion. And theirs. And all it does is show that manufacturer’s claims of repeated write performance are conservative. Since those claims are a) as good or better than those for hard drives and b) more than any normal person would need…the remaining “SSDs will eventually die because you can’t write to them forever” BS that I see occasionally on here and all over the place elsewhere are fairly conclusively bunk.
You’re probably right. But, we’re not talking about large scale purchasing decisions. We’re talking about individuals on a DJ forum. Apart form you, I probably own as many or more drives than 90% of DJTT users.
And, yes, it’s my opinion. And theirs. And all it does is show that manufacturer’s claims of repeated write performance are conservative. Since those claims are a) as good or better than those for hard drives and b) more than any normal person would need…the remaining “SSDs will eventually die because you can’t write to them forever” BS that I see occasionally on here and all over the place elsewhere are fairly conclusively bunk.
I’ve had mine in about 5 years and I keep expecting it to fall to bits, but so far so good
A little bit of hard drive/solid-state drive/general data loss anxiety is a good thing.
Everybody backed up this week? (I haven’t yet…) 
Can’t remember the last time I did actually. Need to get my sh*t in order.