“SSDs are a new phenomenon in the datacenter. We have theories about how they should perform, but until now, little data,” Robin Harris writes for ZDNet. “That’s just changed.”
“The FAST 2016 paper Flash Reliability in Production: The Expected and the Unexpected, (the paper is not available online until Friday) by Professor Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto, and Raghav Lagisetty and Arif Merchant of Google, covers: Millions of drive days over 6 years, 10 different drive models, 3 different flash types: MLC, eMLC and SLC, [and] Enterprise and consumer drives,” Harris writes.
“Two standout conclusions from the study. First, that MLC [Multi-level cell] drives are as reliable as the more costly SLC [single-level cell] ‘enteprise’ drives. This mirrors hard drive experience, where consumer SATA drives have been found to be as reliable as expensive SAS and Fibre Channel drives,” Harris writes. “The paper’s second major conclusion, that age, not use, correlates with increasing error rates, means that over-provisioning for fear of flash wearout is not needed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Harris reminds and we’d like to highlight: “Backing up SSDs is even more important than it is with disks.” See also from ComputerWeekly: MLC vs SLC: Which flash SSD is right for you?