Quote Originally Posted by zads View Post
You guys are on the right track here.
The flash manufacturers rate the PE cycle based on flash data retention and correctability given the amount of spare ECC area on each page and how much that can correct. So you can theoretically run 200%, 300% etc of the PE cycle, but you're gonna get more and more probability of errors or failed drives. The bit error probability skyrockets above the 10^(-15) error rate that most consumer drives quote at this point. When a IMFT 25nm drive starts out, it is likely well beyond a 10^(-20) unrecoverable bit error rate.
Throw in things like temperature variations, background radiation, etc, and you have a smattering of other error inducing mechanisms.
The reason its not booting up is likely that the last remaining firmware copy in your flash got corrupted beyond recoverability.

True enterprise SLC and MLC drives actually push more width and more layers of error correction mechanisms into the drive, which ultimately gives them longer data retention and lower unrecoverrable bit error rates than consumer drives, from infancy to EOL.
Does that mean that the M4 would have continued writing had it not been powered off, and might have continued until the NAND started wearing completely out? The M4 didn't even have any reallocation events, but somehow on power-off I guess the cell charge dissipated. I think it's an artifact of 25nm NAND, that 3xnm NAND gets flagged as bad before the drive gets to the point where MLC trapped voltage "leaks out" of the weakened gates. Maybe I'm phrasing it wrong, but the M4 had 13,330PE cycles on it.

Quote Originally Posted by B.A.T View Post
I know. It's a sad thing to continue without it
I basically stole my M4 back from the family member I gave it to (giving them another drive in its stead). I'm thinking about OPing it and running it, but I'm not sure how many writes it has already. I would guess it's under 200GB.

I just upgraded it to 0009 (It had 0001FW, and yours had 0002 I think). I'm not sure how much value it would be to the test though. That thing was a beast, but once you get to 500TB you should probably start leaving it off for a couple days. There's no guarantee that a second drive would die the same death, but I'll put it out there.