> I normally find it annoying when they run endurance tests like this using only one drive of each brand and treat the results as particularly meaningful.
The main takeaway for me from this is less around the reliability of individual drives, but that SSDs as a whole have moved into a space where I don't really need to worry about them being signifiantly less reliable than hard drives.
While the conclusion is true and has been for some time, the supporting data is insufficient.
For example, the author doesn't even bother to gloss over key reliability parameters such as data retention, which is primarily impacted by cycling.
(By data retention, I mean the ability of drive to retain written data over a period of time, such as 6 months, since written. This is usually accelerated in testing by a bake cycle.)
That said, it's a fun read and I'm glad there's more exposure on this topic.
My Macbook's SSD died in a blaze of reallocated sectors and write failures just last week, and that thing was just around 2 years old.
For comparison, I've only had 2 spinning hard drives fail on me (I've owned around 25), and those were >10 years old and mostly decommissioned.
It could be a statistical fluke, and the sheer speed of SSDs means that even now, a higher failure rate is acceptable, but SSDs in general don't have the longevity of older magnetic hard drives.
My Macbook's SSD lasted just six months before it failed, right before printing a boarding pass for a transatlantic flight. Afterwards it turned out Time Machine had been making corrupted backups, which wasn't fun, fortunately no user data loss, only Applications. I've learnt my lesions about SSDs: they don't give you any hints that they're about to fail, and one they do, it's game over.
> SSDs as a whole have moved into a space where I don't really need to worry about them being signifiantly less reliable than hard drives
The majority of SSD reliability problems never had anything do with flash endurance. You can tell this from the failure mode too: all the data disappears. Instead, they are caused by firmware and design bugs that cause occasional corruption of the FTL internals.
Regular benchmark-style IO patterns aren't a good way to tickle these bugs so the endurance test doesn't really say anything about this main problem.
The main takeaway for me from this is less around the reliability of individual drives, but that SSDs as a whole have moved into a space where I don't really need to worry about them being signifiantly less reliable than hard drives.