The SSD Endurance Experiment

Retro

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Back in 2015, The Tech Report ran a long term write endurance test on six SSDs and the good news is that they all lasted far beyond their rated specifications. Would be interesting to see a repeat of this test, since manufacturers are using more and more levels for their SSDs nowadays, which lowers their write endurance and hence may perform worse. Don't assume anything though, as technology improvements and quality can make a big difference here.

Of particular note is the author's writing style, with the first couple of paragraphs being a great example. I think the humour is excellent, keeping me fully engaged the whole time and I really enjoyed reading the article.

Note that this is a final concluding article, since the tests were all complete at that point. Can you guess which SSD was the toughest of the lot with the best endurance before reading the article?

I think it would have been interesting to add a couple of HDDs to this test to see how well they faired. Wouldn't surprise me if we saw an early failure since these things are mechanical.

I never thought this whole tech journalism gig would turn me into a mass murderer. Yet here I am, with the blood of six SSDs on my hands, and that’s not even the half of it. You see, these were not crimes of passion or rage, nor were they products of accident. More than 18 months ago, I vowed to push all six drives to their bitter ends. I didn’t do so in the name of god or country or even self-defense, either. I did it just to watch them die.


Technically, I’m also a torturer—or at least an enhanced interrogator. Instead of offering a quick and painless death, I slowly squeezed out every last drop of life with a relentless stream of writes far more demanding than anything the SSDs would face in a typical PC. To make matters worse, I exploited their suffering by chronicling the entire process online.

Nerd level: hardcore PC tech enthusiast.

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