High-end SLC SSDs No More Reliable than MLC SSDs: Google Study

[RejZoR]

So HDDs are still king for archival purposes. Why am I not surprised? At least there's imperical evidence of the fact now.

That's why I'm still a sucker for hybrids. In my setup, if SSD fails for whatever reason, my system will just revert to HDD speeds. No data loss.

 

[yogurt_21]

for consumers that makes sense. The trouble with enterprise level is that single drive failure isn't really concerning. As long as the average drive lasts 5 years it doesn't really matter if even 10% die within the first 6 months. You throw those out or warranty them and pop in a replacement drive into the array. No downtime or data loss. Plus as fast as raid 10 rebuilds on a ssd, you will barely have any time with the array in a degraded state. Advanced SAN's are also protected against that by simply ignoring the degraded array until it comes back to full speed.

The main gist of what I'm seeing in this study and others is that our propensity for reliability may not be in line with how cloud services are moving. As long as it has "good enough" reliability the real focus should be on speed. After 3-5 years that SAN will be retired and something faster will come online. They really won't care how much longer the drives last after retirement. That's the worry of the person buying the old used tech, not amazon or google.

 

[RejZoR]

That's the thing. Corporations buy them en mass. They are expendable for them. Not for consumers who run single drives and demand durability and reliability.

 

[Parn]

Guess I've made the right choice to stick to HDDs for my home file server. SSDs will be strictly for OS/Program on my desktops/laptops.

 

[xorbe]

Reliable as in data retention, or reliable as in also reliable performance?

 

[xtremesv]

30-80%? Don't you think that's a rather large margin to come up with a conclusion. Well anyhow, if that study is valid then the part of SSD age being more critical than use worries me.