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Re:SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year. by lomnakkus on Saturday May 03, 2014 @12:06PM (#7691246)
"I'm sure they wear out quick with heavy writes."

Do you have something to back that assertion up? Seriously, I'm interested, so if you have links to further information, I'm sure everyone would appreciate it.

Re:SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year. by jhallenworld on Saturday May 03, 2014 @01:00PM (#7691448)
Well here is one, but this is really for the device level: http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2012/talks/Tuesday/T04_Hei...

If I find a good system-level paper, I'll post it.

Anyway, SSD drive wear tends to be rated like this: 5 years for x number of full drive writes per day. For good drives, x is 1. For really good SLC NAND based drives x could be as much as 10, but they are very expensive. For cheap consumer drives x could be 1/10. Based on vendor sales meetings, the aggressively large drives also have low write endurance (but then they say they are not optimized for heavy writes).

Better drives should have a built-in write counter so you can track the remaining life.

Another interesting parameter is their power-off "data retention" time. At end of life, this tends to be specified to be just 90 days.

Re:SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year. by tim333 on Saturday May 03, 2014 @01:40PM (#7691637)
There seems a lot of contradictory data out there but Techreport did an experiment with 6 consumer grade 256GB drives endlessly reading and writing:

http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endur...

They were still going after 600TB of read writes though with some degradation:

http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

Re:SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year. by jhallenworld on Saturday May 03, 2014 @02:32PM (#7691868)
Interesting, my one quibble is that I don't see anything about the temperature. Flash memory is very sensitive to it.