Gordo,

The MWI for most drives is extremely conservative, but that helps take into account the fact that some drives will not make it as far as other drives (if you had two identical drives, under an identical workload, they probably wouldn't die at exactly the same time). The way PE cycle ratings are generated is extremely pessimistic, and a little arbitrary, but there are reasons they do it that way.

For a 830 only using 1 PE cycle a day (based on ~3600 PE cycles) it would take 9.8 years give or take to get to MWI 1. It's unrealistic to expect the drive to last that long though, as generally speaking, it's going to be something else that kills the drive.

I would hate to venture how far my 256GB 830 will go, I've pretty much been wrong on every prediction in the past. The 830 has been slowly marking blocks as bad, and that's a good thing. That means its doing what it's supposed to. What you don't want to see is many reallocations occurring within a short period of time - you want them to be spread out. The 256GB 830 used 107 PE cycles yesterday. The 128GB Plextor M3P I'm also testing writes almost as many GB per day, but it uses almost 2x the PE cycles. So all other things being equal, the M3P 128GB should die ~2x as fast. There are many other variables, making it hard to tell for certain -- that's why I'm testing them.

You never know.



I would say that the G2 Intel and the Samsung 830 aren't going to be obsolete any time soon. And if people are going to be dumping them in landfills in a couple years mostly unused, I wish someone would tell me first