Yousuf Khan wrote:

Lynn McGuire wrote:

"How Reliable are SSDs?"
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reliable-are-ssds/

I used to also think SSD's are more reliable than HDD's, but recently
I've had nothing but trouble with a particular brand of SSD, the Adata
SU630 series is absolutely crap. I've already had to return 3 of them,
and I'm getting ready to return my 4th. Thank god I got good backups!
They are good about exchanging their products, but I doubt that they've
even noticed that I've returned 4 of their products already under
warranty. They don't even ask questions, just take your RMA order. They
must be using the worst Flashram in the world, from the reject pile of
every manufacturer around. I've had enough, and I'm going to replace
with a WD SSD now, but I will get the latest replacement and probably
put it into an external case for occasional large storage requirements
that don't need to be on all of the time.

I was expecting the article to provide some actual statistics,
especially since the author was Backblaze. Instead it was just a bunch
of general information with no statistics at all. Pretty useless since
it never does address how reliable are SSDs as experienced from actual
use in their data centers.

However, Backblaze doesn't use SSDs for storage of customer data, just
for a few boot drives or as frontend servers, like database servers.
They don't have many to provide any statistics, so they won't have any
statistics to report. Yet that article is just generalized fluff about
SSDs versus HDDs. You cannot draw many conclusions from it, and nothing
substantial regarding reliability.

If you want to increase the lifespan (aka endurance) of an SSD, increase
its overprovisioning. That allocates more reserved space to accomodate
failed memory blocks that will happen eventually. You lose some
capacity for the unallocated space on the SSD for more (well, any)
overprovisioning, but if you're getting tight on space (and aren't
collecting tons of garbage files or data that could be stored elsewhere
like on a cheaper HDD) then you really should get higher or more drives.

Most consumers look at the marketing data, like capacity. Important is
the read and write speed (with writes being slower than reads because of
the procedure to do writes). I see the same for most buyers of USB
thumb flash drives: they go for capacity without ever investigating how
fast (or how slow) they are, but then many makers don't publish those
specs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q15wN8JC2L4
https://www.seagate.com/tech-insight...its-master-ti/
https://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/overprovisioning

I think the typical overprovisioning is 10% of the rated capacity of the
SSD, but I think the amount varies by capacity with 10% used for all
consumer-grade drives over some threshold in capacity. The server-grade
SSDs usually have 20% overprovisioning, and that's what I use, too,
although my SSDs don't get anywhere the volume of writes that business
use would encounter.

I've stuck with Samsung for SSDs: both as encased drives for internal
use connected to power and SATA cables from the motherboard (Samsung 850
EVO 2.5" 250 GB SATA-3, bought April 2016) used in my prior Win7 box,
and for m.2 drives into sockets on the mobo (Samsung 970 Pro M.2/2280 1
TB Gen3 NVMe PCI 2-bit MLC, bought April 2019) used in my latest build
(Win10). Never had any problems with those. I might use Crucial (who
doesn't make anything, but has good specs with the actual plants) or
Crucial (their high end products).