SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

[Anvil]

@john

My Agility 3 60GB does 85-86K random 4K writes, short bursts though and as usual we are talking about easily compressible data.

[Ao1]

When I read the Mushkin blurb about "unthrottled IOPS", my first interpretation was that they meant that the IOPS (i.e., 4KB high QD performance) is not throttled. I doubt they mean that they have disabled the lifetime throttle for write speed.

It seems that the SF2xxx drives have more options in how you can throttle performance. Muskin have confirmed the following to a query I made:

"DuraClass management functionality is still active. “Unthrottled” in this context refers to write IOPS bursting up to 90,000+ but being governed down to 20,000 after a few seconds which is typical behavior with standard firmware with SF-2281. The firmware we have on the Chronos and Chronos Deluxe drives will not have that governor activated."

If they switch it off altogether I might get one.

[zalbard]

So why are the drives being throttled then, exactly? If it's not DuraClass...

[johnw]

@john
My Agility 3 60GB does 85-86K random 4K writes, short bursts though and as usual we are talking about easily compressible data.

As I wrote, "I doubt the Mushkin can achieve 90,000 IOPS unless you feed it highly compressible data".

[johnw]

It seems that the SF2xxx drives have more options in how you can throttle performance. Muskin have confirmed the following to a query I made:

"DuraClass management functionality is still active. “Unthrottled” in this context refers to write IOPS bursting up to 90,000+ but being governed down to 20,000 after a few seconds which is typical behavior with standard firmware with SF-2281. The firmware we have on the Chronos and Chronos Deluxe drives will not have that governor activated."

So I guessed correctly!

[johnw]

So why are the drives being throttled then, exactly? If it's not DuraClass...

Sandforce throttles the IOPS on any of their drives that do not specify something like "high IOPS". I assume Sandforce charges OCZ et al. a little extra to disable the IOPS throttling on certain SSDs.

[Anvil]

64.23TB Host writes
MWI 64

No other changes.

[Anvil]

65.32TB Host writes
MWI 63

updated chart

[Ao1]

An update on my V2. I left it idling with no data on it after a secure erase. I then ran a series of iometer based benchmarks. The advantage of the benchmark is that I can incrementally increase the size of the test file from 1GB to 12GB.

I ran each benchmark run sequentially, starting with 0 fill for the first run. All following runs were done with non compressible.

In total 30GB of non compressible data & 1GB of 0 fill.

After this barrage I let Anvil's Endurance app run. Within 2.91 hours or 383.17Gb the drive was throttled down to 6.71MB/s.

So, it seems that even a small amount of idle time will enable performance to get back, but if you sustain the writes you end up back being throttled.

Good news in a way. If I leave the drive to idle for a week or so and don't write excessively I should not experience any slowdowns.

That's the end of the V2 in this thread

[johnw]

Within 2.91 hours or 383.17Gb the drive was throttled down to 6.71MB/s.

6.71 MB/s comes to:

403 MB/minute
24.2 GB/hour
580 GB/day
4.06 TB/week
17.6 TB/month
212 TB/year
635 TB in 3 years
1.06 PB in 5 years

In P/E cycles, assuming 40GiB of flash to distribute writes over, no WA:

13.5 per day
94.5 per week
410 per month
4900 per year
14800 in 3 years
24700 in 5 years

If the throttling algorithm is indeed a hard 6.71MB/s lifetime limit line that the controller does not allow the SSD to cross (although I wonder about the granularity....1 second? less? 1 hour?), then if your SSD is in a throttled state, you should be able to "revive" it at a rate of 24.2 GB per hour of powered-on idle time. So if you had a benchmark that wrote 20GB of data, if you just left the SSD idle for an hour before the benchmark, it should measure unthrottled performance. Depending on granularity, and whether the algorithm really works the way I think (a lifetime write line that cannot be crossed).

[Brahmzy]

So do Mushkin's new SF2xxx unthrottled drives still come with a 3 year warranty? Anybody know?

If they do, then I think the other acts need to follow suit and offer the same. While I believe I've never experienced a throttle with my SF2xxx SSDs (and maybe RAID0 lessens the chances) it'd still be nice to see this throttling bit be a consumer choice.

[Ao1]

It seems that formula might not be too far off. Here is an AS SSD after an hour or so idle. (Time between this post and the last).

(This really is the last post here on the V2 )

[johnw]

So do Mushkin's new SF2xxx unthrottled drives still come with a 3 year warranty? Anybody know?

If they do, then I think the other acts need to follow suit and offer the same. While I believe I've never experienced a throttle with my SF2xxx SSDs (and maybe RAID0 lessens the chances) it'd still be nice to see this throttling bit be a consumer choice.

You seem to have misinterpreted what Mushkin meant. They were talking about IOPS throttling (none). The lifetime write throttle will still be present, I think.

[Anvil]

67TB Host writes
MWI 63

67TB_HW.PNG

edit:

At 67.01TB MWI changed to 62

[Anvil]

69.88TB Host writes
MWI 61

updated chart

[One_Hertz]

92.2tb. 53%.

[Anvil]

So, not long before you reach 3x rated endurance

The daily break (5-10minutes, including manual TRIM) helps a bit but there is no competition vs the 320 Series.

[Anvil]

72.79TB Host writes
MWI 59

updated chart

[One_Hertz]

97tb. 50%.

[dr_sharp]

Interested to see final results.

[Anvil]

75.69TB Host writes
MWI 58

close to 10GB of random writes last 24 hours.

[chuchnit]

If you do a fresh format, how much available space does windows say you have?

[Ao1]

So it look like the added random data is not having a noticable impact. Still near perfect linear wear and writing speeds.

[One_Hertz]

99TB. 49% as of this morning. It sure is taking a long time to kill this thing. I still don't believe there is any way it will last close to 1PB.

100TB is 50+gb per day for 5 years. Kind of funny how many people still do things like putting page files and browser cache on their HDD to minimize writes to the SSD...

[Computurd]

yes this has definitely changed my perception of how to treat my own ssds. these are probably a bit tougher than the ol vertex gen1 i still use, but really theyve been in raid-0 with 8 disks forever, so im sure they have tons of life left in them!