erik quanstrom wrote: > do you really think its reasonable that someone could run this > drive at 100% of capacity for 2½ years? even allowing for shipping > and installation time will get you pretty close to the warranty. > can you think of how this could be done with a plan 9 application > that's doing something useful? > > it's hard to know if non-random writes create more wear than intel > specifies or not. strictly sequential i/o should create similar wear > because 16 4k writes can be combined into one flash cycle and > 16*3300*4k is about 216 mb/s. so i don't see how you can get in > more flash cycles than 3300/s and increase the wear rate.
Short flash lifetimes in some consumer products have been attributed to poor or even nonexistent wear leveling algorithms. If the wear leveling algorithms used in SSDs are very good and the usage pattern doesn't tickle some pathological case, then flash wear will probably not be an issue. I look forward to someone like Google or one of the DoE sites deploying large numbers of SSDs and publishing reliability statistics. John
