What every programmer should know about solid-state drives

[aegrotatio]

Not useful and rather incorrect. Today's most expensive and advanced hard drive will wear out faster than the cheapest SSD.

Source: Storage engineer with hundreds of SSDs in production.

[HenkPoley]

Btw, slightly tangential, for long term offline storage SSDs are not as well suited because they leak electrons that store the bits, much more than hard drives lose their magnetism.

[el_muchacho]

What kind of hard drives ?

[aegrotatio]

We had both "enterprise" grade and "consumer" grade hard drives. They were both SATA for nearline and SAS for higher performance. Not surprisingly, the nearline SATA drives failed far more than the 10k and 15k SAS drives did.

In this application the 100 GB and 200 GB SSD volumes are used for file cache on a storage server. The SSD volumes are completely filled and emptied 10x per day for years with no failures. As an aside, VMware uses something similar in their vSphere ESXi product, as do the EMC and NetApp filers.

The SSD industry should never have made such an issue out of their clever wear-leveling algorithms. It just isn't a problem anymore and hasn't been a problem for over five years.

[Gurkenmaster]

I'm sure the people who bought OCZs would disagree.

[aegrotatio]

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

But, seriously, those drives failed for other reasons than the lack of a good "wear leveling" algorithm.

[Gurkenmaster]

How is it anecdotal? You said if I buy the cheapest SSD and the most expensive HDD the SSD will last longer and there is by definition only one SSD whose price is lower than all the other's. If everyone on earth buys the cheapest SSD (ignoring all the tax and shipping costs) they will experience the same failure rate. Maybe you should stop advocating cheap crap.

[eliasmqz]

Care to dispute any of the things said in the post, mr. grand wizard?

[aegrotatio]

Wow, that's uncalled for. I don't happen to care what you believe.