Quote Originally Posted by johnw View Post
So, I think measuring the time and amount written until throttling, after 24 hours of idling, is probably the most accurate method. Of course, it is easy enough to do both methods, but if they do not give the same number, I know which method I will trust more.
Agreed your method is the accurate one, but I don't necessarily agree on the sawtooth.

I was thinking the opposite issue, if there's a flaw with "LTT performance = throttle slope" it's that LTT performance might be better than the throttle/lifetime slope and that you would need more than 24 hours of idle recovery to full-speed write the equivalent of 24hrs of LTT writes.

We saw with the Vertex 2 40GB it was writing at ~6.25MiB/sec with LTT, which works out to ~11 P/E cycles a day (with just a WA of 1.00x, which we deduced is too optimistic for 100% incompressible data). A three year warranty at that rate would work out to ~12,000 P/E cycles, which is what I was getting at when I said "LTT functioning isn't quite faithful to its intention"....it's intention to drag the life of the drive out to the end of the warranty period, but 12,000 P/E cycles is 2.4x what the NAND is rated at and seems optimistic for a warranty.

We'll know more as more testing gets done, but that's my theory on why LTT performance would not equal the throttle/lifetime slope....and if it does, then observing LTT performance is a nice and quick way to figure out the daily write budget