Quote Originally Posted by Christopher View Post
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.
Really? What else would kill it? An electrical surge? A blown capacitor? The drive controller chip wearing out?

As far as PE cycles go, would you say that your drive is indicative of what one should expect with Samsung 830s? With your 830 at ~7600 WLC, doesn't that mean that most cells have more or less lasted to about double the manufacturer expected lifetime so far? I assume a core assumption in all this endurance testing is that there's not much variation between drives of the same type at least as far as PE cycles go, which is why you feel comfortable making basic conclusions using only a single drive of each type. If there was a lot of PE cycle lifetime variation between two drives of the same model (say your 830 is a real outlier, and mine is much closer to manufacturer speced PE counts), I would think this whole exercise would not be particularly useful as far as forming generalized conclusions about what a particular drive should be expected to do.

Also, for a given write load, doesn't increasing the size of the drive quickly make up for say the difference between 3k and 5k PE cycle NAND? In other words, if you have a massive write load application, just pick a bigger drive. Alternately, can't manufacturers just move to larger and larger SSDs to account for lower PE Counts associated with smaller and smaller smaller process NAND chips (all else being equal)?

Quote Originally Posted by Christopher View Post
What you don't want to see is many reallocations occurring within a short period of time - you want them to be spread out
Right, but once the NAND is beginning to reach its actual physical limits, assuming you have an excellent wear leveling algorithm, wouldn't one expect that the reallocations actually do start to happen almost all around the same time as each NAND cell reaches its limit?