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News Flash Destroyer tests flash write cycles

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by CardJoe, 28 May 2010.

  1. deadlyavenger

    deadlyavenger What's a Dremel?

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    I'm tempted to make one as a general gadget/art piece. Have it sitting on your desk and when people ask what it is...you can explain it to them. Especially since you can change the time of the write cycles.

    Chances are...they'll already know what a massive nerd you are and let you get on with it.
     
  2. rickysio

    rickysio N900 | HJE900

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    Program it to display the time instead, with a quartz oscillator writing to it every second. When the time stops instead of the "Oh, battery's flat.", the "Oh, EEPROM's dead." should be interesting.
     
  3. oceanwaves7

    oceanwaves7 What's a Dremel?

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    Ok, I've come to a conclusion as to why no one is testing a real SSD (or it's chips) with this method. Because with a modern (2008-2010) SSD, you wouldn't be able to kill the drive before you were very old. Simply writing at 80 MB/sec 24 hours a day, to a 64GB SSD would last 51 years assuming typical life expectancy roughly 2 million cycles, average of 2 to 5 million write cycles. Also the bigger the SSD, the longer it would last at the same data throughput. So writing to one at 160MB/sec that was 128MB would last the same amount of time. But at 80, again it would double it's life to 102 years.

    While you could test individual chips, you will never kill an SSD to any reasonable level even after years and years of trying. And even if that rate were lower, the drive still would take many years to destroy. But then again, who even writes continually to their drive anyway? In that case you can pretty much assume you won't be wearing it out. An interesting read on the myths of SSD life expectancy:

    http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
     
  4. Elledan

    Elledan What's a Dremel?

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    It's very much possible to kill an SSD by writing something like two 4kB writes/second to it. Shouldn't take more than a month or so.
     
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