SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

[Ao1]

My 2 cents. For enterprise applications SF drives are a great solution. That is what they were designed and optimised for. For client applications you get a great boost from the spare area that is made from the OS and application installs, which saves around 4GB of NAND writes. After that however savings start to evaporate. We know that SF can easily compress zeros, but they struggle to compress anything else in client based applications. For sure SF cannot compress anything close to the theoretical compressibility of data in client applications with a low QD, so I would argue quiet strongly that the theoretical compressibility of application data is nothing like what can be achieved in real life. No-one (to my knowledge) using SF drives for normal client based activities has been able to demonstrate a significant difference between host and NAND writes.

If the data can’t be compressed, read and write performance can suck. As soon as the drive is in a steady state performance also drops.

With regards to endurance; now that it appears that expiry of the MWI puts data retention a risk I’m much more interested about how well the SSD performs before it gets to MWI 1 (or MWI 10 in the case of SF drives). The endurance advantage does not show up in the tests to date, even when data can (in theory) be compressed by 46%. For an enterprise workload however I bet it works just great.

Admittedly I’m not a fan of SF drives. I just can't see the advantage of a SF solution against any of the current gen drives. If you take reliability and the uncompressibility of data into account I can only see a disadvantage to current gen drives. It will be interesting to see what Intel do with SF. If they have been able to tweak the firmware it might be interesting, but if its stock SF firmware I’m struggling to understand why Intel would want to mess with them.