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Lifespan for Consumer SSD drives?
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Lifespan for Consumer SSD drives?

donkodonko Member
edited February 2020 in General

Hello, in your experience which is the average lifespan for Consumer SSD drives?
Using for host multiple sites or in shared hosting environment.

I have a dedicated server with a Kingston SSD A400 (480gb).
How i can determine how much used was it? or their lifetime expectancy or just can randomly die no matter the usage?

Comments

  • donko said: How i can determine how much used was it?

    Use smartmontools.

  • johnxenspecjohnxenspec Member, Host Rep

    Most manufacturers release a datasheet with all the specifications the drive "should" hold up to. Based on what you said, it looks like this is the datasheet for your drive: https://www.kingston.com/datasheets/SA400S37_us.pdf

    Unfortunately, most consumer SSDs cannot last nearly as long as their enterprise counterparts. The 480GB model is rated for 160TBW, and 1,000,000 power-on hours. Any drive can unexpectedly fail, but it's less likely to happen with enterprise gear.

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran

    johnxenspec said: Unfortunately, most consumer SSDs cannot last nearly as long as their enterprise counterparts. The 480GB model is rated for 160TBW

    Consumer SSD lifespan is massively underrated both by users and by vendors. Try Google Translate;

    For instance here's the A400 240 GB, rated for 80 TB written, endured 600+. For the 480GB model, you can multiply that by 2. And the reviewer even concludes that's not too great, only because many other models were found capable of much more.

    Thanked by 1donko
  • PUSHR_VictorPUSHR_Victor Member, Host Rep

    I have been unable to get a single SSD to fail, and am using both consumer and enterprise models of all kinds in very tasking environments since ~2013. Durability would definitely not be the reason for me to choose one over the other, based on this experience.

  • HarambeHarambe Member, Host Rep

    I've only seen 1 consumer SSD fail spectacularly - some cheap ADATA, effectively DoA - errors within the first 2 weeks.

    I've got a 500GB 850 EVO that's been used & abused, sitting at 170 TBW (rated for 150), still working fine. 4 reallocated sectors so I'm not trusting it with anything critical, but it's still serving fine as a scratch disk for my torrents linux isos.

    Thanked by 1donko
  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider
    edited February 2020

    I've never had an SSD fail. I had some consumer drives in use for 3~ years with constant load and never a problem. I eventually reused them and put one in a laptop, still no problem. I don't use them anymore though.

    Thanked by 2donko Synatiq
  • Had a consumer drive fail last week. The drive was fine the controller took a piss. Had been running it for over two years and it was used before that, so take what you will.

    Thanked by 1Janevski
  • The actual flash in the SSD probably won't die from even highly above average usage, although the controller can. Also, if you're using it intensively, you will probably be limited by IOPS, rather than anything else.

  • SplitIceSplitIce Member, Host Rep

    I've never had one die, and I've still got OCZ Vertex3&4 drives in use

  • Quality SSDs can write quite a lot before failing. New Seagate m.2 nvme drives are rated for 2600tbw.

  • HostSlickHostSlick Member, Patron Provider
    edited February 2020

    Samsung Consumer ones are good indeed.
    I have some 860 Evo running for almost a year uptime soon under load.

    Some Customer colocated a server with 4x1TB San Disk consumer drives.
    It failed after two months, two drives at same time. Luckily different spans, so his data was still there and drives replaced.

    I had some of them too. Not very good.

    Micron Consumer Drives are good too. Atleast from my experience

  • I've had consumer NVMe drives failing more often than standard SATA SSDs. Most of the MacBook repairs we received at the AASP provider I used to work for had failed NVMe drives and with those there's no way to recover anything back without breaking the bank.

  • I've had a few SSDs fail at home. An SanDisk drive just stopped working completely (was in a desktop, just didn't wake up on boot one day), an OCZ drive did the same while in use (in the home server, the other half or the RAID 1 pair survived), and a Crucial drive started spitting out SMART warnings (it was removed and replaced before anything was lost). I don't have any remote dedicated servers with SSDs so can't comment on that. The drives I have at home are all consumer grade.

    At DayJob we've had a couple of Kingston drives fail in dev boxes, at least one "just dead" and one started giving off read errors, those are consumer grade drives too.

    From what I gather, just failing completely is a more common failure mode for SSDs than it is for traditional drives (where surface errors are the usually killer).

    Despite the one failure I have a quite a few Crucial drives (in my own machines and that I've put into others) that have been reliable and we have a lot of those Kingston units in operation at DayJob so a failure or two probably isn't too bad. Samsung drives have a good reputation, but I only have the one so can't comment with any statistical relevancy.

    As a rule I don't have anything in a server that I care about as a single drive: everything, including SSDs, are paired/trippled/quadded up in RAID1/RAID1E/RAID10 arrays. The one exception is the Kimsufi box I use for large files for friends/family to see & (ahem) "transfers", that can die and be rebuilt easily. Same for desktop/laptop/phone: they are all backed up to one or more of the RAIDed servers.

  • Gamma17Gamma17 Member
    edited February 2020

    One important difference between "enterprise" and "consumer" flash is that first one is rated for 3 months data retention after rated amount of p/e cycles, second one - for one year.

    Which means that exactly the same memory chip in "enterprise" SSD will be rated for much higher number of p/e cycles than one in "consumer" SSD.

    Because of this comparing TBW numbers for "enterprise" and "consumer" drives directly does not provide any information about which one will practically last longer.

  • If you want to go for enterprise grade SSDs, go for it.

    Do you really need it? Not unless you need it for your enterprise. But we both know it's not about that. It's about what you want. And the best way is to get one of each and find out on your own.

    Personally, I'm happy with my Samsung 970 Evos and 970 Pros. Both work great. Even my Samsung 840 Pro from a few years back is working fine in my server.

  • JordJord Moderator, Host Rep

    MX500's are prem

  • Still having an old evo840 250gb that works like new.

  • @MikeA said:
    I've never had an SSD fail. I had some consumer drives in use for 3~ years with constant load and never a problem. I eventually reused them and put one in a laptop, still no problem. I don't use them anymore though.

    I've had a load of OCZ vertex 2E's die but it was controller failure I think, it was a known issue in some firmwares.

    I've got a load of 120GB crucial drives that were formally abused and well past their rated endurance and those still work. Wouldn't trust them with anything critical though.

    Take backups and be prepared to replace the drive but you may find it lasts way beyond what the expected lifetime.

  • @ewrek said:
    Still having an old evo840 250gb that works like new.

    What HD Tune says?
    I remember Samsung 840 (non-pro, non-evo) and 840 EVO had issues with voltage drift and slow reads of old data while benches like crystal disk gave normal results. Eventually they rolled firmware update for EVOs, but never did for the 840 (non-pro, non-evo) one.

    My tiny experience with consumer drives:
    840 pro 128gb - works fine (16+ hours a day various load for 6+ years)
    850 evo 250gb - works fine (24/7 light DB usage for 4+ years)
    2*860 evo 250gb - work fine (16+ hours a day various load for 3+ years)
    860 evo 500gb - works fine (16+ hours a day various load for 2+ years)
    Intel 535 240gb - having a bug with write amplification while in idle state (Intel never released official fix). The datacenter version have that bug too. Unfortunately after few BSODs caused by the GPU the relocated sectors count jumped to 10+ during the second year of usage. Now it is used for non-important stuff.
    Gigabyte 240GB - was cheap. When used as boot drive sometimes it says "no boot disk", then after power-off and power-on it starts and runs perfectly normally. Not bad-enough to be RMAed, not usable either. Currently used as scratch drive.
    8gb Phison mSATA that came with eeePC - was slow, failed miserably after 2 years of light usage.

    I would say 860 EVOs (in RAID 1) are good-enough. Especially if your app is not heavy on writes. Everything cheaper than that is call for trouble and RAID 1 is a must.

    Thanked by 1Janevski
  • Well i got another dedi with a Kingston A400 480gb, maybe someone here can tell me if is ok for a ssd have 70MB/s disk speed because i don't see any wrong on smartctl

    (using bench.monster)
    Disk Speed:
    1st run : 71.6 MB/s
    2nd run : 68.4 MB/s
    3rd run : 69.2 MB/s


    Average : 69.7 MB/s

    smartctl

  • @donko said:
    Well i got another dedi with a Kingston A400 480gb, maybe someone here can tell me if is ok for a ssd have 70MB/s disk speed because i don't see any wrong on smartctl

    (using bench.monster)
    Disk Speed:
    1st run : 71.6 MB/s
    2nd run : 68.4 MB/s
    3rd run : 69.2 MB/s


    Average : 69.7 MB/s

    smartctl

    A400 is dramless so in some cases it may be outperformed by a typical hard drive.

  • @Moofie said:

    @donko said:
    Well i got another dedi with a Kingston A400 480gb, maybe someone here can tell me if is ok for a ssd have 70MB/s disk speed because i don't see any wrong on smartctl

    (using bench.monster)
    Disk Speed:
    1st run : 71.6 MB/s
    2nd run : 68.4 MB/s
    3rd run : 69.2 MB/s


    Average : 69.7 MB/s

    smartctl

    A400 is dramless so in some cases it may be outperformed by a typical hard drive.

    Comparing my current A400 on other server vs this new one, i found both have different firmware version and seems like that can possibly affect performance (my current a400 at least do 170MB/s).

    latest firmware is SBFKK1B3 and this new disk have SBFKB1D1

    I sent a ticket to see if that can be fixed, 70MB/s is bad even for a low end dedi.

  • @donko said:

    @Moofie said:

    @donko said:
    Well i got another dedi with a Kingston A400 480gb, maybe someone here can tell me if is ok for a ssd have 70MB/s disk speed because i don't see any wrong on smartctl

    (using bench.monster)
    Disk Speed:
    1st run : 71.6 MB/s
    2nd run : 68.4 MB/s
    3rd run : 69.2 MB/s


    Average : 69.7 MB/s

    smartctl

    A400 is dramless so in some cases it may be outperformed by a typical hard drive.

    Comparing my current A400 on other server vs this new one, i found both have different firmware version and seems like that can possibly affect performance (my current a400 at least do 170MB/s).

    latest firmware is SBFKK1B3 and this new disk have SBFKB1D1

    I sent a ticket to see if that can be fixed, 70MB/s is bad even for a low end dedi.

    Still would recommend avoiding the A400 but that may be a possible cause

    Thanked by 1donko
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