I'm watching this thread with great interest. I suspect people will be linking to these tests for a long time in any theoretical discussion of flash NAND SSDs. Since none of the drives have reached their p/e cycle limit yet the endurance portion of the testing is yet to come, but I'm very much looking forward to what will happen.

So far what I have learned the most from this thread is about SandForce-OCZ life throttling. Thanks Ao1! I was worried that life throttling would kick in way before 30 TB of initial writing. It would be nice to get more testing to explore the parameters of the throttling. So around 30 TB in 7 days for a fresh drive. If we could work out the exact parameters we could monitor our writes to stay just below the throttle curve. The algorithms do seem complicated though since Ao1 could write as much as he wanted for the first 30 TB. It seems like the parameters change after that. Presumably this boundary would by higher on larger drives. I'd like to see more testing of the parameters of throttling after the boundary. Fascinating stuff.

I so want to hack the Sandforce firmware and disable the throttling or just reset everything so it thinks it's a new drive again. Or maybe set the clock forward by 5 years. I did download some versions of mptool, but I don't really know what I'm doing, and I think you need a very specific Sandforce version of mptool which I don't have.

I am quite disappointed by those incompressible data sequential write speeds which are much lower than even many older hard drives and frankly quite pathetic. I guess that's a limitation of flash NAND. I do realize that larger drives will be faster due to interleaving, but still. I guess SSDs have to live or die by random read/write speeds, which makes me interested in the question of exactly how much of my daily disk usage patterns is random, particularly when running games or other apps that I would put on an SSD.

I think I bought too much into the whole Sandforce hype. With unrealistically compressible data the Sandforce sequential write numbers look so impressive, getting right up to the limit of the SATA interface. Using compression when your competition is not can give you a lot of at least somewhat bogus numbers. In fact I am wondering how a non-Sandforce drive would do if you used some kind of whole partition on-the-fly compression software with it. That sort of thing is probably what gave Sandforce the idea in the first place. Nevertheless Sandforce's on-the-fly hardware compression idea was a great one, and I hope competitors like Intel and Marvell will follow, but with less fascist firmware. Not that I really blame Sandforce for this. No one is forcing the the SSD vendors to leave the throttling enabled. They deserve most of the blame here.

I still think the Sandforce drives seem pretty good compared to the competition, but I am tempted to boycott them anyway due to the corporate fascism of life throttling. I don't like being told what I can or cannot do with a product I have paid so much money for. It really pisses me off. If you don't want to warranty the product then don't, but don't try to force me to use it in a certain way. I didn't rent the thing. I bought it. And I think the numbers we will see in this testing will definitively show how absurd the whole life throttling idea is. And at 6 MB/sec it isn't even slow enough to accomplish their purpose. At continuous usage a 25nm 40 GB drive would still reach its p/e limit in about a year. I guess they figured if they made it any slower it would be considered a complete disabling of the drive and that might have legal repercussions. That's about the only thing that seems to stop corporations nowadays from knowing when to stop in their single-minded pursuit of money at any cost: the threat of getting sued. Also, OCZ is either lying or mistaken about the secure erase reset since it clearly doesn't work.