Thankfully we don't need to just take Intel's word, we can measure ourselves. For the past couple of years Intel has included a couple of counters in the SMART data of its SSDs. SMART attribute E2h gives you an accurate count of how much wear your current workload is putting on the drive's NAND. To measure all you need to do is reset the workload timer (E4h) and run your workload on the drive for at least 60 minutes. Afterwards, take the raw value in E2h, divide by 1024 and you get the percentage of wear your workload put on the drive's NAND. I used smartmontools to reset E4h before running a 60 minute loop of our SQL benchmarks on the drive, simulating about a day of our stats DB workload.
Once the workloads finished looping I measured 0.0145% wear on the drive for a day of our stats DB workload. That works out to be 5.3% of wear per year or around 18.9 years before the NAND is done for. I'd be able to find more storage in my pocket before the 710 died due to NAND wear running our stats DB.
For comparison I ran the same test on an Intel SSD 320 and ended up with a much shorter 4.6 year lifespan. Our stats DB does much more than just these two tasks however - chances are we'd see failure much sooner than 4.6 years on the 320. An even heavier workload would quickly favor the 710's MLC-HET NAND.
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