SSDs vastly exceed official endurance specifications

The Tech Report performed an SSD endurance experiment to see how the current generation of consumer-grade solid state disks stack up in terms of longevity. The site notes all six SSDs tested vastly exceeded their official endurance specifications, writing hundreds of terabytes without issues and surviving far more writes that most users are likely to generate.

Of the six disks put through the torture test, the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB and Kingston HyperX 3K 240 came out best. Both of these disks made it all the way to 2 petabytes and despite the fact that the Kingston disk stumbled through a couple of uncorrectable errors the duel could go on for a while as both disks refuse to give up. The Tech Report promises an update in the future.

The main lesson though is that consumers shouldn't really worry about the endurance of modern SSDs.

To be fair, our sample size is too limited to draw definitive conclusions about the drives we tested. Flash wear is tied to the physical integrity of individual cells, so it can be influenced by normal semiconductor manufacturing variances. One needs to look no further than the experiment's twin HyperX units to see that, even within the same family, some SSDs simply have more durable NAND than others.

The results of our experiment do, however, point to some more general conclusions about SSDs as a whole. Although only two drives made it to 2PB, all six wrote hundreds of terabytes without issue, vastly exceeding their official endurance specifications. More importantly, the drives all survived far more writes than most users are likely to generate. Typical consumers shouldn't worry about exceeding the endurance of modern SSDs.

You can check out the article over here.