SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

[Anvil]

I'm considering changing from the X25-V as the bootdrive to the 830 64GB on 2 or 3 computers, I'm still waiting for the Intel 520 though
(those are all 3Gb/s setups but still I find it worth upgrading)

[Ao1]

I’m waiting for the 830 to get to MWI 1 before changing over to a 830 for my OS drive. I'm looking forward to it although the 60GB drive I have is a bit too small. I might get an Intel 520, but only if Intel has managed to improve performance with compressed data. If not I’m not interested.

[lm358]

Host writes: 15,236 GiB
MWI: 11
P/E Cycles: 3,232
POH: 401
Relocated sectors: 8,192
MB/s: 5.95

Excuse me if some of these questions are a bit dense, just trying to grasp SSD endurance testing...

1) if you've only written 15TiB but the MWI is already at 11 isn't that very bad? (Assuming MWI=100 initially and 0 means that one should replace the drive [according to the manufacturer]). So assuming that MWI is decreasing linearly w.r.t host writes you'll only have a "official" life of only ~17TiB?
2) why is your MB/s so low compared with Christopher's for the same drive? I'm probably missing something here..

[Christopher]

Excuse me if some of these questions are a bit dense, just trying to grasp SSD endurance testing...

1) if you've only written 15TiB but the MWI is already at 11 isn't that very bad? (Assuming MWI=100 initially and 0 means that one should replace the drive [according to the manufacturer]). So assuming that MWI is decreasing linearly w.r.t host writes you'll only have a "official" life of only ~17TiB?
2) why is your MB/s so low compared with Christopher's for the same drive? I'm probably missing something here..

Ao1 is doing the test differently than I am. He is doing full span 4K writes which dramatically increase write amplification and as a result is much slower. The whole drive is full, and writing each additional 4K chunk requires a lot of effort on the part of the drive.

My 830 is being tested like all the other drives are. It has 18.5GB of static data, and writes on the remaining space until the minimum amount of free space is reached (normally around 12GB). So around 30GB gets written each loop, at which point the files get deleted and the drive starts again (after writing 100MB of random writes). Repeat ad nauseum.

[Anvil]

Kingston SSDNow 40GB (X25-V)

658.98TB Host writes
Reallocated sectors : 05 21
Available Reserved Space : E8 99
POH 5944
MD5 OK

--.--MiB/s on avg (~-- hours)

--

Corsair Force 3 120GB

01 120/50 (Raw read error rate)
05 2 (Retired Block count)
B1 42 (Wear range delta)
B6 1 (Erase Fail Count)
E6 100 (Life curve status)
E7 10 (SSD Life left)
E9 771069 (Raw writes) ->753TiB
F1 1026074 (Host writes) ->1002TiB (~22TiB left until 1PiB is reached)

MD5 OK

---.--MiB/s on avg (~-- hours)

power on hours : 2917

--

System was frozen again tonight, I discovered the issue within an hour so there's not much missing.
Spent some time figuring out if there are changes to the system but I can't think of anything...

I have applied the LPM fix, lets see if it behaves.

[B.A.T]

Todays update.
Kingston V+100
346.7130 TiB
2034 hours
Avg speed 26.26 MiB/s
AD still 1.
168= 1 (SATA PHY Error Count)
P/E?
MD5 OK.
Reallocated sectors : 00


Intel X25-M G1 80GB
277,65 TiB
20488 hours
Reallocated sectors : 00
MWI=126 to 124
MD5 =OK
49.22 MiB/s on avg


m4
301.3858 TiB
1112 hours
Avg speed 81.57 MiB/s.
AD gone from 187 to 180.
P/E 5307.
MD5 OK.
Reallocated sectors : 00


SSDLife Pro is still not working so you just got ASU this time.

[Anvil]

I noticed you've restarted the Kingston V+100, is it failing on a daily basis?

[Christopher]

Samsung 830 64GB Update, Day 51
FW:CXM02B1Q

TiB Written:
340160.01

GiB written:
332.1875

Avg MB/s
132.97 by 7:30PM, the drive has written 9000GB -- which is awesome

PE Cycles
15667

Reallocated Sectors
45056
22 Blocks, holding steady

1210 hours




OCZ Vertex Turbo 64 Update Day 7

TiB 40.1624
GiB 41126.35
Avg MB/s 82.02

Avg Erase Count
736
MWI 86 down from 93


1 Program Fail
20 Erase Fail (up from 19)
0 Read Fail
152 Hours




That Kingston... I ended up with what I'm certain is almost identical drive, and it's not spectacular either. I tried to get an Imation S Class slc 32gb drive a while back, and I recieved an M-Class J.Micron controlled Toshiba NAND 64GB drive. It's not stellar, and has the same smart info as the Imation MTRONs. The Toshiba controller in the Kingston is just a JMicron, right?


Incidentally, the next time I take the endurance rig down for maintenance, I'm tossing in one of the MTRON 16GBs (whichever drive I can shoehorn in there). I'm probably just do biweekly updates with it, but I'm curious what will happen. I was thinking 4GB of static data (perhaps the Windows7 Install DVD). If it can hold 50MB/s plus writes, I think something interesting should happen in 2013.

[Christopher]

Check out these 830 Benches.

The write speed is back to normal... but the reads are awful.



SATA III is working properly, too. I double and triple checked.

I took before and after secure erasure benches, but they both look like this.

[Track]

Hey, guys.

I'm sorry if I'm diverting the cause of this thread, or even thread crapping, but I feel like I need to ask something.

Seeing the results of your laborious review of SSD failure rate,

I am wondering whether you think that a 128GB C300 would be a better choice in terms of longevity than a 128GB M4.

I am in the market for such drive and plan on buying it later today.

[Christopher]

Hey, guys.

I'm sorry if I'm diverting the cause of this thread, or even thread crapping, but I feel like I need to ask something.

Seeing the results of your laborious review of SSD failure rate,

I am wondering whether you think that a 128GB C300 would be a better choice in terms of longevity than a 128GB M4.

I am in the market for such drive and plan on buying it later today.

Umm, I don't think the answer is obvious. The C300 is a fine drive, but so is the M4. I don't think there is a reason to avoid the M4... the first M4 that B.A.T. tested made it well past 700,000GB of writes.


That one was a 64GB model, so the 128 could maybe do double that? Either way, drives do die on occasion -- but practically never from wearing out the flash. That's something that can happen here in testing, but it's really not a possibility for a normal consumer workload over five years (or longer).

For example, my main desktop writes about 10GB a day. Yesterday my Samsung 830 I'm endurance testing wrote 1100x that amount. It's been doing that for over 50 days now. The Intel X35-V in the test has been writing as fast as it can since last May. Your drive spend only a couple of minutes a day writing data to the drive.

You may also wish to consider the Plextor M2P and Corsair Performance Pro 128 GB drives. They use the same Marvel controller as the M4 but with 32nm Toshiba Toggle NAND.

Either way, the M4 and C300 are both fantastic and generally well reguarded in terms of reliability. The C300 looks a little slow in comparison now to it's contemporaries, but is very fast none the less.



LASTLY:
We're trying to kill the SSDs, in case you weren't really aware. We're not "testing failure rate" ; on a long enough time line, the failure rate for all the drives in the test should be 100%. The test started as a way to determine if 2xnm NAND was as "good" as 3xnm NAND, but it's a good way to test and understand other aspects of SSDs.

Essentially, we kill drives (on purpose), and we're pretty good at it.

[Ao1]

Host writes: 15,752 GiB
MWI: 7
P/E Cycles: 3,376
POH: 401
Relocated sectors: 8,192
MB/s: 6.25

[Ao1]

I just checked my 830. I stopped the endurance test but left the test file intact, so this is on a full drive that has had no chance to recover from 4K random writes. AS SSD crashed half way through, which I guess was due to the fact that the drive had no space to write.

Next I deleted the test file and ran the test again. Impressive.

[Christopher]

Ao1,

Your drive looks impressive. Mine... not so much.

Yeah, I secure erased mine -- and it didn't help. The writes are very impressive, but my reads are in the toilet and I don't really have an explanation.

Now, the reads used to be better while the writes were bad, but now the opposite is true. It's currently over 134MBs avg, and one out of every three loops is 160MBs instantaneous while the previous two are in the high 140's.

[B.A.T]

I noticed you've restarted the Kingston V+100, is it failing on a daily basis?

It fails betwheen 24-36-72 hours and increasingly the last 3 weeks.

[B.A.T]

[

That Kingston... I ended up with what I'm certain is almost identical drive, and it's not spectacular either. I tried to get an Imation S Class slc 32gb drive a while back, and I recieved an M-Class J.Micron controlled Toshiba NAND 64GB drive. It's not stellar, and has the same smart info as the Imation MTRONs. The Toshiba controller in the Kingston is just a JMicron, right?

The Kingston V+100 got a Toshiba controller labeled T6UG1XBG.

Hey, guys.

I'm sorry if I'm diverting the cause of this thread, or even thread crapping, but I feel like I need to ask something.

Seeing the results of your laborious review of SSD failure rate,

I am wondering whether you think that a 128GB C300 would be a better choice in terms of longevity than a 128GB M4.

I am in the market for such drive and plan on buying it later today.

They are booth good SSD. Go for the cheapest and fastest one. You can't go wrong with them.

[Christopher]

So I started a longer-term test of the MOBI 3000 to see if it's a decent test candidate. With 3GB of static data and 2GB min free space, it's averaging 53.99MBs over the past 9 hours. I'm not convinced the one smart attribute's raw value is in fact erase count, but if it is, it's going to take a long time to deplete MWI.

After 9 hours, the "erase count" is up to 4,010,600. When it hits 160,000,000 MWI should decrease from 100 to 90 -- which should happen in 360 hours or 2 weeks. Multiplied by 10, it should take 20 weeks/140 days to deplete MWI if the erase counter works as suspected. Assuming it lasts 3x longer, it could take 420 days to kill the drive.

[bulanula]

Hey, guys.

I'm sorry if I'm diverting the cause of this thread, or even thread crapping, but I feel like I need to ask something.

Seeing the results of your laborious review of SSD failure rate,

I am wondering whether you think that a 128GB C300 would be a better choice in terms of longevity than a 128GB M4.

I am in the market for such drive and plan on buying it later today.

I suggest the M4 because they still have FW updates coming out and it is faster than the C300 !

[Christopher]

The MOBI dropped out, but I think because it was just hanging by the cables in another system. I believe I'm going to start testing it for real, but it's going to take some time.

[Christopher]

Samsung 830 64GB Update, Day 52
FW:CXM02B1Q

TiB Written:
351548.67

GiB written:
343.3092

Avg MB/s
133.80

PE Cycles
16112

Reallocated Sectors
45056
22 Blocks, holding steady

1235 hours

Late last night I SE'd the drive. PE cycles won't update for a few days.


OCZ Vertex Turbo 64 Update Day 8

TiB 47.0706
GiB 41126.35
Avg MB/s 82.66

Avg Erase Count
864
MWI 83 down from 86


1 Program Fail
21 Erase Fail (up from 20)
0 Read Fail
176 Hours

[Christopher]

We have a new challenger:


MOBI 3025 16GB SLC Day 1

2536.64GB
2.4772TiB
54.31MBs
100/100/7578154




I'm officially entering the MOBI today. I couldn't get the drive open to take a peek inside, so I'm obtaining another one to disassemble.

Those write speeds are pretty fantastic for a glorified flash drive.

UPDATE:
To the extent I could, I took apart the 3.5" MTRON 16GB 7000 PRO SLC. Despite being made in Korea, it actually uses Micron SLC (on both sides of the 3.5" PCB I think) and not Samsung as I had assumed. So I assume the 3000 MOBI does too. How interesting.

The MOBI has a 2.5" plastic chassis, and the TORX screws won't all come out -- they've broken the plastic threads on the bottom, making it almost impossible to remove.

I did get the 7000 apart, and it has 16 1GB Micron 29F8G08DAA, 8 on each side. There is a Silicon Image SATALink, presumably because the drive is not native SATA. There is 16MB of Samsung DDR and two Texas Instruments chips I don't recognize. And of course, the MTRON controller.

It's really quite something. I guess it's similar to the internals of the MOBI.

[Ao1]

Host writes: 16,174 GiB
MWI: 2
P/E Cycles: 3,563
POH: 473
Relocated sectors: 8,192
MB/s: 4.28

[Ao1]

MWI: 1
P/E count: 3,580
Drive filled with data and check summed.
Power off/

Next update: April 26th

The log files can be downloaded from the links below. There are three files that cover SMART activity from when the drive was new al the way to MWI 1. Every time the f/w updated a new log file was created, hence three files.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B71...k3ODAxOWUwNzY1
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B71...Y4ODViNTdiN2Nk
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B71...ZjOGU4NjQ0NTZk

[Anvil]

The Force 3 disconnected 7 hours ago, could be the LPM fix makes a difference to how it disconnects.

I physically reconnected the drive and all is well, it did happen while deleting files so it looks to be something related to TRIM.

I'm filling the free space with a "46%" file and when it's deleted I'll restart testing, will post an update tonight on both drives.

[minpayne]

MWI: 1
P/E count: 3,580
Drive filled with data and check summed.
Power off/

Next update: April 26th

The log files can be downloaded from the links below. There are three files that cover SMART activity from when the drive was new al the way to MWI 1. Every time the f/w updated a new log file was created, hence three files.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B71...k3ODAxOWUwNzY1
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B71...Y4ODViNTdiN2Nk
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B71...ZjOGU4NjQ0NTZk

How did you do the check sum of filled data? Did you fill the disk with a large file right before MWI exhausted? I found that doing an SHA-1 or MD5 hash value of the whole physical disk doesn't work, as each time I mount the disk, the operating system would always write something into the disk...