How long, exactly, do SSDs last? It's a difficult question to answer because estimating an SSD's life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more. When we did our in-depth examination of how SSDs work a couple of years back, we looked a bit at how those factors affect drive life, but TechReport is going even further than that and has been subjecting six drives to a long-term torture test to actually measure, rather than estimate, the drives' service life.
The results are impressive: the consumer-grade SSDs tested all made it to at least 700TB of writes before failing. Three of the drives have written 1PB (that's a thousand terabytes, by TechReport's decimal reckoning, not 1024TB). That's a hell of a lot more writes than the manufacturers' stated drive lifetimes, and that's good news for SSD-buying consumers.
Performing that many writes takes time—in fact, TechReport has been torturing the drives to death since last August. The six drives chosen to die for science are Corsair's 240GB Neutron GTX (with 19nm MLC NAND), Intel's 240GB 335 (with 20nm MLC NAND), two of Kingston's 240GB HyperX 3K drives (with older 25nm MLC NAND), and two Samsung drives—one 256GB 840 Pro (with 21nm MLC NAND) and one 250GB 840 (with 21nm TLC NAND). The Intel and Kingston drives use SandForce controllers, the two Samsung drives use Samsung's own controllers, and the Corsair drive uses a controller from Link_A_Media Devices.
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