Posted on Tuesday, September 09 2008 @ 0:05 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Some extra info on Intel's new X18 and X25 solid state disks appeared online. According to
details quoted by TG Daily, Intel claims a lifespan of 5-years for its solid state disks.
At another talk give by Intel Fellow Al Fazio, Intel touted SSDs longevity and tried to dispel the myth that SSDs wear out quickly. Fazio’s slides showed that the X-18/25 SSDs have a mean time before failure (MTBF) rating of 1.2 million hours, which is on par with modern server hard drives. In addition, he claimed that the drives can withstand a workload of 100 GB worth of writes a day for five years.
But is this enough? Intel’s spokesperson for the storage group, Deb Paquin, told us that most people only write a few gigabytes worth of data each day, so hitting 100 GB/day would be difficult. “During onsite tests with our own employees, we found that most people used about 2GB to 3 GB a day, and the highest power user we had was much less than 20GB,” Paquin said.
So if you extrapolate Intel’s data, then at 2-3 GB a day an SSD should outlast our frail human bodies, but what if the drive was under heavy load, like that of a server or perhaps even a rogue or poorly written program?
Intel’s claim of 100 GB/day for five years totals approximately 182500 GB worth of writes or 182.5 terabytes. Let’s make a big assumption that we can max out the 70 MB/sec max transfer rate until the SSD dies, this gives us 19 minutes to write the entire 80 GB disk and 30 days to hit 182.5 terabytes. Now I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t look too shabby considering most people would notice something bad was happening after an hour or two, let alone 30 days.
