SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

[Christopher]

Christopher I might be completely wrong in my assumption. Let me try to better explain where I was coming from. With a HDD I believe numerous attempts will be made to read/ write to a sector before it is finally marked as being defective and relocated. My assumption was that before failing sectors were relocated it might be feasible that read/ write performance would suffer. Once the sectors were relocated read/ write performance would revert back to normal. This seemed logical to what I could observe on my drive, but in truth I don’t know if or how bad the impact might be on performance before the sector was taken out of the equation.

How many sectors on your drive got relocated in one hit?

You really have to admire how the Intel drives have performed in this test. They may not be the fastest but they are the best engineered by a long shot IMHO.

I would only get 1 block at a time, which is 2048 sectors. The drive has used 20 of it's reserve blocks, 40960 reallocated sectors. If you look at the SMART data from the last few updates, notice that there are no program fails, just 10 erase fails, and 10 "runtime" bad blocks, for a "total" of twenty. But the runtime bad blocks should be program + erase fail together, which makes me think the attributes could be mislabeled or somthing. In reality, only 10 blocks should be counted, but total used reserved blocks are 20.

I understand what you are saying. I know from experience with another drive, one which I will start testing on Monday, that if there are bad blocks which haven't been flagged, it will take much longer to read and write to the nand for the affected region. MLC drives' NAND do get slower over time (at least in theory) as it has to try harder to resolve errors and sort out the Vth readings, which is one more reason why I love my X25-Es.

I totally agree about the Intel drives. They might not be fast, but I think they're as close to bulletproof as you can find. I don't personally know of anyone who has owned an Intel drive that has suffered a failure, nor have I really read too many horror stories. I believe that the two Intels in this test -- 40GB drives no less -- might end up being the real story here. Who would have imagined almost 700TB from a 40GB MLC drive? Especially one with 25nm... that's effectively as fast now as it was new, and there are no signs that either drive is on it's way to the grave yet.