Is there a definitive lifespan estimate for Intel MLC Drives

I wanted to buy the new Intel X-25m g2 (80/160 GB) drives, and before I bought that I wanted to know what is the average life span of these drives.

I know that the SLC drives last over 40-50 years, but they are way expensive. I need to use these drives in a server environment, with around 5-10 GB of writes and 40-50 GB of reads every day.

I googled around but didn't find any definitive answer about the lifespan of these drives, only form posts discussing it.

I need at least a 10 year average life expectancy for these drives (the existing SCSI drive in my server is 7 years old) and was wondering whether the MLC drive would be sufficient for me, or I need to shell out the big bucks for the SLC one. Space is not really an issue, as I just need around 30 GB of disk space, so even a 32 GB drive would probably be ok, it's the lifespan that I'm more concerned with.

Jalpesh

Posted 2009-10-07T22:43:04.730

Reputation: 111

@Jalpesh: 7 years is an unrealistic expectation from most secondary storage hardware, including SSDs and HDDs. You got lucky with the one drive, but that doesn't mean you have seen typical performance. – Billy ONeal – 2010-11-16T05:58:10.137

I think this question is probably more appropriate for superuser.com (or perhaps serverfault.com). – Michael Ekstrand – 2009-10-07T22:48:56.237

retagged now that it's been migrated – quack quixote – 2009-10-07T23:06:46.990

Answers

Not sure if you're still checking this but anyhow...

Intel's new G3 (third generation) SSDs have an alleged lifespan of 60Tb.

http://gizmodo.com/5657487/intels-leaked-25nm-ssd-600gb-storage-with-four-times-the-lifespan

If you write 5Gb a day, then the drives will last you all of 12,288 days, or 33 years.

If you write 10Gb, then halve that, obviously.

For the older G2 drives, the lifespan is meant to be around 15Tb, so at 5Gb a day, that gives you around 8.4 years, or at 10Gb, half that.

Hopefully that answers your question.

I have to say though, 5-10Gb of writes a day? That's a heckload...lol. What are you using this for? Some sort of write-heavy DB server? Scientific calculations? Some protein mapping project? Lol.

Cheers, Victor

victorhooi

Posted 2009-10-07T22:43:04.730

Reputation: 121

It's mostly a retail point of sale application, which by itself does not do much writes - however windows 7 has a nasty habit of writing a lot of stuff to disk. I did some calculations - in 470 days, i noticed that it had written 2.79 TB of data (using intel ssd toolbox). The application itself only generates about 50 mb of data every day, so the rest is probably just windows. – Jalpesh – 2011-08-26T19:40:01.960

I'm afraid even if the official lifetime expectancy was available, only the time will show what the real lifespan is. Nobody can guarantee you 10 years on a fresh new technology right now.

user12925

Posted 2009-10-07T22:43:04.730

Reputation:

Here's an article about just that topic:

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

tl/dr: With current technologies write endurance is not a factor you should be worrying about.

Tim Sylvester

Posted 2009-10-07T22:43:04.730

Reputation: 273