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The SSD is less likely to fail during its normal life, but more likely to lose data.
Using data from millions of drive days in Google datacenters, a new paper offers production lifecycle data on SSD reliability. Surprise! SSDs fail differently than disks - and in a dangerous way. Here's what you need to know.
SSDs are a new phenomenon in the datacenter. We have theories about how they should perform, but until now, little data. That's just changed.
The FAST 2016 paper Flash Reliability in Production: The Expected and the Unexpected, (the paper is not available online until Friday) by Professor Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto, and Raghav Lagisetty and Arif Merchant of Google, covers:
- Millions of drive days over 6 years
- 10 different drive models
- 3 different flash types: MLC, eMLC and SLC
- Enterprise and consumer drives
Key conclusions
- Ignore Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER) specs. A meaningless number.
- Good news: Raw Bit Error Rate (RBER) increases slower than expected from wearout and is not correlated with UBER or other failures.
- High-end SLC drives are no more reliable that MLC drives.
- Bad news: SSDs fail at a lower rate than disks, but UBER rate is higher (see below for what this means).
- SSD age, not usage, affects reliability.
- Bad blocks in new SSDs are common, and drives with a large number of bad blocks are much more likely to lose hundreds of other blocks, most likely due to die or chip failure.
- 30-80 percent of SSDs develop at least one bad block and 2-7 percent develop at least one bad chip in the first four years of deployment.
Read more: SSD reliability in the real world: Google's experience | ZDNet
Backup Backup Backup Backup !!!!!
The SSD is less likely to fail during its normal life, but more likely to lose data.
I am now fully SSD (having three 850 Evos of various sizes) but I only feel safe doing that because I have a NAS box.
NoteJust to bring to everyone's attention:
"The FAST 2016 paper Flash Reliability in Production" was written about SSDs used in Google's datacenter's, which have very, very heavy usage.
The normal home user could never possibly have so many writes, deletions, garbage collection and TRIMs per day.
Hi there
I hope the NAS box isn't using SSD's --unless it's for the OS -- I should think any sensible NAS box would have probably 5 - 12 TB as an average size for home users --a 12 TB SSD currently !!!! well it would certainly be hideously expensive - not really necessary for things NAS boxes are usually used for. Google can afford this sort of money (probably small change - especially as they probably pay less TAX than most of us here !!) but Home users will have to wait a bit longer for these types of SSD's to fit into their machines.
Another one here to emphasize BACKUP !!! -- as for reliability I'm sure the MTBF (for our non Engineering colleagues here - that's the "Mean Time before Failure" which is a typical measurement used in Engineering to determine the reliability of components) of even cheap SSD's is probably LONGER than that of standard HDD's these days - especially consumer grade HDD's.
Once large capacity SSD's come down to the same or cheaper price than current HDD's then there is NO REASON why you should be scare of using them. That days isn't quite here yet -- although it's great to see how many people are using SSD's for their OS.
Cheers
jimbo
I don't see much sense in the statement: SSD age, not usage, affects reliability. Since all of their SSD's are being hit constantly (usage) it doesn't follow that "usage" would not dovetail precisely with "age"--ie, the older their SSD's, the more they would have been used, etc.
Plus, gigantic SSD's are still being researched and developed and so SSD tech is nowhere near as stagnant as HD tech at the moment. What looks like a solid result this year may not even apply to next year's tech, etc.
All I can say is that I am happy as a clam with my tiny 250GB EVO 850 boot drive (c:\) thus far...but I backup every new Insider build to an HD partition I reserve for that distinct purpose. I actually clone my SSD there, and then run a Win7 backup copy there, too, for good measure. (I have all of my applications & games on other partitions & drives (HD's) than c:\--all I keep on c:\ is the OS, device drivers, and various utilities I consider indispensable. )
Amazingly that may take awhile. I was shocked to find decent 1TB WD hard drives for between 50 an 75 bucks(Blue vs. Black). Now I run SSDs, but occasionally look at HDDs in case I need a backup drive. Personally, I've become addicted to the SSD speed, so I don't see me changing back unless compelled. Even so, hard to beat HDD prices anytime soon.