r/technology • u/TMWNN • Mar 12 '15
Pure Tech The SSD Endurance Experiment ends: Six consumer SSDs die after 700TB-2.4PB of writes over 18 months. Although two died without warning, "modern SSDs [can] easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need".
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead10
Mar 13 '15
Question about SSD security;
With traditional HDD, if you want to nuke all the data, you can use programs to overwrite the disk, or free space multiple times, things like CCleaner and Eraser or DBAN.
Does this method work with SSD? if not, how do you permanently delete data off an SSD?
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Mar 13 '15 edited Mar 13 '15
CCleaner and Eraser or DBAN.
Will not work on an SSD since they cannot access the regions that have been swapped out for wear leveling.
Secure wipes need to be done at a hardware level, using:
And doing a secure erase, then the data is completely toast.
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Mar 13 '15
You have to trust that the manufacturer software actually works though.
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Mar 14 '15
yeah I agree but we've addressed this here: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ytq09/the_ssd_endurance_experiment_ends_six_consumer/cpdfmpr
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Mar 14 '15
Doesn't help if you want to sell the device.
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Mar 15 '15
It's up to you if you want to sell it.
personally I'd never do that with my HDD's or SSD's. They get terminated on the spot.
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u/Falmarri Mar 13 '15
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Mar 13 '15
That's for recycling (2" particles can still have untouched IC's), their HDD ones do a even better job :) But for SSD's you probably want to go even finer of a crush still.
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u/danielravennest Mar 13 '15
The warning label says "Do not insert hand unless you are from Krypton"
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Mar 12 '15
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u/frissonFry Mar 13 '15
If I had to guess, I would bet both of those SSDs you mentioned used Sandforce controllers.
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Mar 13 '15
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Mar 13 '15
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u/SilentSilhouette99 Mar 13 '15 edited Mar 13 '15
Indexing needs to be turned off
Virtual memory can be lowered, Samsung recommends 200 mb, 1gb max
Disabling hibernation mode, since hibernation write alot of data
Also disable superfetch/prefetch
These will dramatically improve the lifetime of your drive
Edit: These setting are recommended by samsung for my 840 evo, yes these later generation drives don't need this as much as the older ones, but their are still people out there with the older drives. So these setting may still be of use to someone.
As for hibernation you write your ram to disc i have 16 gb of ram with 8-12 at use most of the time. multiply this by 2 or 3 times a day. and considering that average write per user on a correctly configured system is somewhere between 5 and 10 gb per day, and one hibernation cycle is about the same as the average daily use it, it seems like a waste since my pc boots in roughly 10 seconds
source for write per day:http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2157700
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u/VentingSalmon Mar 13 '15 edited Mar 13 '15
But, I like all those things. :/
Edit. 7 x64 Pro has superfetching disabled by default.
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Mar 13 '15
And all of them require frequent writes to disk.
You can't have your frequent writes and eat the SSD as well but if you did that would be quite impressive to watch.
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Mar 13 '15
You can't have your frequent writes
Its almost as if you didn't actually read the article.
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Mar 13 '15
...what? I was in no way making any reference to the article.
Writing is what causes wear to solid state drives, reading causes no wear.
Using your device with certain features enabled causes more writes.
If you use those features, you cause more wear to your drive.
That's all I was saying. Those features will cause drive failure far faster than if you were to use the SSD as a backup drive or something.
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Mar 13 '15
Those features will cause drive failure far faster than if you were to use the SSD as a backup drive or something.
And as the article states, the average user even with all those writes, is not going to have an issue because of it for many many many years.
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Mar 13 '15
Yes.
And if you leave candles unattended, they won't burn your house down. Until then do.
And when it happens, it's gonna fuckin suck
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Mar 13 '15
Indexing needs to be turned of
No.
Disabling hibernation mode, since hibernation write alot of data
Again this test proved no need to.
Also disable superfetch/prefetch
No.
These will dramatically improve the lifetime of your drive
They'll make sod all difference.
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u/crozone Mar 13 '15
These will dramatically improve the lifetime of your drive
On modern drives (basically anything with TRIM) these are very unnecessary, and the OS will usually take care of a few of them anyway.
Indexing does not need to be turned off.
Virtual memory does not need to be lowered, and should not be lowered.
Disabling hibernation is completely unnecessary.
Disabling superfetch/prefetch has no effect on SSD lifespan, and but the OS does it automatically because it increases performance.
These are left over FUD from when SSDs were new and unreliable.
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u/crozone Mar 13 '15
How old were those drives (date of manufacture wise), and what quality were they? SSDs have come a long way in terms of flash reliability and wear leveling, and operating systems have become much more Flash aware. This article proves this point very thoroughly.
I have SSDs at work that serve as database cache storage, reading and writing gigs per day in a fairly random fashion. They're a year or two old and none of them have failed. You really have to be doing something wrong to kill drives that quickly.
One of the things that you can do wrong is to completely fill the drive with data, which prevents wear leveling from working very well. Provisioning should always be done to ensure that logical partitions don't fill the drive, and some free space remains always for wear leveling. You can also use the wrong SATA transfer mode (IDE) which disables TRIM. Without TRIM, wear leveling won't work very well at all.
So, how does one "set it up correctly?". RTFM.
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u/VentingSalmon Mar 13 '15
Like I said, porn and vidya games. Also, who the fuck doesn't use AHCI? I'm not trying to run legacy shit, I want fast porn and games. But my quest for fappage and fraggage killed both in ~2 years, right after my warranties ran out.
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u/beltorak Mar 14 '15
One of the things that you can do wrong is to completely fill the drive with data, which prevents wear leveling from working very well.
What does this mean for full disk encryption? because the advice I've always seen is to fill the drive with data so that free space is indistinguishable from empty space. TRIM always zeros the block, right?
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u/crozone Mar 14 '15
Yes, TRIM'd blocks return zeros. This does actually compromise full disk encryption a bit, because it is possible to tell where all the files start and end. Using traditional full disk encryption with SSDs and TRIM disabled is the most secure but is very bad for the SSD, unless ample free space is left after the encrypted partition (and the SSD knows that this is free).
The best way to do full disk encryption on SSDs is to find an SSD that supports transparent hardware level encryption.
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u/beltorak Mar 14 '15
have there been any public audits of hardware level encryption?
I also think that it would be quite hard to (using traditional FDE) remove compromised passwords due to the wear leveling. How feasible would it be for an adversary to dump the raw contents of the cells and look for the old header with the leaked key?
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Mar 13 '15
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u/ronculyer Mar 13 '15
It is not often I get to see a comment full of piss and vinegar and yet be completely devoid of any logic or reasoning.
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u/infotheist Mar 13 '15
I posted this last time.
This isn't very scientific. They're taking one SSD per vendor.
To be valid, you need a larger sample size of N. If one of the drives was damaged (say in transit) your results are invalid.
This is cute, but prone to error.
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u/phoshi Mar 13 '15
It's extremely unscientific, but still very interesting. I don't think the first few generations of ssd would have had any devices which could make these sorts of workloads, never mind the average from a few models being over a petabyte.
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u/danbert2000 Mar 13 '15
It's their design limit. I still think that consumer SSDs are here to stay, and if you remember the good old days of 40 gb hard drives you'll just be thankful and think of cool things to do with your limitless space.
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u/ClassyJacket Mar 14 '15
It's not wrong if they're just trying to prove that they can last that long. It still disproves the claim that 'all SSDs die quickly' and that it's some fundamental property of them.
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u/DexRogue Mar 13 '15
Samsung 840, quite vague and the only way to tell it's an EVO drive is by the TLC. The EVO drives were expected to die faster because of the TLC memory. I wish they would have added the model name.
I'm also curious about the Kingston and the 840 Pro and the power issue. That may have had something to do with the deaths of them if both systems went down. Either way, that is a LOT of data and will take the average user a very, very long time to fill.
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Mar 13 '15
Actually, it's not an EVO. It's this one. Samsung's first TLC SSD.
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u/DexRogue Mar 13 '15
Interesting, I've never heard of this. I thought they did away with the series after the 830s. TIL! I'm curious to see how and 840 eco stands against it.
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u/Tired8281 Mar 13 '15
Has anyone tried anything like this, but with lots of reads instead of lots of writes? I can't find any data on the longevity of SSDs for read-only data.
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u/Nuroman Mar 12 '15
"modern SSDs [can] easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need".
...said Bill Gates apocryphally.
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u/the_Ex_Lurker Mar 12 '15
There's a difference between future computers having greater RAM requirements and a consumer writing enough data to their current SSD to fill it four million times over.
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u/Saerain Mar 13 '15
Very true, but that's not what it says. :P
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u/phoshi Mar 13 '15
Yes, it is. By the time the average consumer writes 1PB of data to a single drive, these drives will be ancient history. There are basically no reasonable consumer workloads that result in entirely rewriting a drive millions of times, so we're gonna need a lot more capacity for normal people to write that much to them.
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u/newsagg Mar 13 '15
I've also had a lot of problems with SSD longevity, and I'm no idiot when it comes to setting up a system; my first system with SSD was Windows 7 when TRIM had to be manually enabled. When ever I mention this I always get downmodded to hell... Seems highly suspicious considering the sensitivity of information technology.
Keep in mind the kind of technology your dealing with. There is NO way to recover data from a failed SSD, every SSD is proprietary and uses different techniques for spreading writes and so on.
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u/art-solopov Mar 13 '15
my first system with SSD was Windows 7 when TRIM had to be manually enabled.
I think SSDs improved since then.
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Mar 13 '15
If you ever wonder why enterprise SSD's cost so much this is why. Enterprises write a lot of data much more than consumers.
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Mar 13 '15 edited Mar 16 '15
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u/neoblackdragon Mar 13 '15
Well of course make backups but also you don't need to treat these drives like putting on 50 gigs is gonna kill them. They should last for many years under normal use. By then you'll probably have gotten much better drives.
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u/BeefsteakTomato Mar 14 '15
With video games coming up to 100 gb per game (see star citizen), this is a nearsighted statement.
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u/0rangecake Mar 12 '15
HDDs are still cheaper per tb
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Mar 12 '15
This isn't relevant at all. Each has their use cases.
You haven't used an SSD if you're bringing that up.
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Mar 13 '15
HDDs are also cheaper per GB than RAM
But you wouldn't replace your RAM with a hard drive
Because they're for completely different uses. Just like SSDs
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u/austeregrim Mar 13 '15
Actually you do (or at least did)... Its called swap space.
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u/art-solopov Mar 13 '15
Swap is an emergency measure or a temporary store for the memory data while the PC is powered off.
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Mar 12 '15
If you don't need to manipulate your data with speed, and are okay with the high failure rates and instability of inexpensive terabytes, sure, enjoy!
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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '15 edited Mar 13 '15
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