Comment by bullen

Typically true. The more expensive the drive the more likely it'll be MLC or SLC, and if you're willing to go out of spec it's usually possible to reprogram a drive controller to operate in SLC mode.

That's pure anecdata. We don't even know your workload or configuration.

Contrary anecdata: I just replaced my old SSDs: 2013 64GB 20nm MLC at 19% wear level and a 2018 500GB TLC at 34% wear level. Not because they failed, but because I had the OS on a 64GB RAID1 and needed more space. Only optimization was setting "noatime".

But that's still a horrible small N, so even the comined data is essentially meaningless.

btw, I replaced them with a bunch of HGST DC SS200 1.6TB from 2018, two of which have about as much capacity as your 30 disks. The 15nm MLC NAND is rated for 3 DWPD and has a 3% wear level. The dual ported SAS3 interface is overkill for me.

I went for a 5 disk RAID6, and could replace it another 8 times while still keeping some spare change for a visit at a gourmet restaurant.

How much are you writing to those drives?

Have you tried any drives that will extend their pseudo-SLC cache across the entire space, and then only partitioned 25-30% of the nameplate capacity? That'll get you a terabyte for less than $300.

Personally I've had two SSDs in active use and both have done a lot better than that. One was MLC and died after 13 years, and the other is TLC and still working after 10 years.

>No MLC lasts 5 years tops.

A 64gb Intel’s X25-E is rated for about 2 PB of TBW.

A S3700 (400gb) is rated for 7 PB TBW range and gets you 400gb not 64gb usable space.

>The stats don't look too good.

It seems to me that you're trying very hard to not look at stats and insist on extrapolating your small sample personal experiences?

Frankly for 3k you could have built a pure optane rig of equivalent capacity that would have crushed both your X-25E suggestion and my S3700 if you're really obsessed on endurance.

I'm generally of the meet people where they are and support their journey persuasion but when someone says 64GB SATA v2 drive with no trim and really bad metrics across the board is their best ssd buy I gotta say something

I've had a few Kingston V300 120GB SATA MLC SSD's I bought on a stupid cheap sale at Microcenter and tossed into a raid 0 for funzies in 2012. They're still running just fine after being online all the time for the last decade.

Depends on the usage and the initial claimed DWPD.

I've seen Samsung 860 Pro (DWPD of 0.6) doing fine after years under LUKS (the worst case for SSD). As soon as you go for DWPD > 1 (real or effective) the wearout is not a problem.

>Just like DDR3 has the lowest CAS latency with ok bandwidth and longevity.

Source? AFAIK successive generations eventually had the same or slightly CAS latency in absolute terms. However, because CAS latency is measured in clock cycles, and successive generations have higher clock speeds, the latency "number" is higher, but that's an illusion. DDR3-1600 CL8 has the same latency as DDR4-3200 CL16.

>DDR2 probably lasts more than 100 years.

>Think about that, any device manufactured in the coming 50 years will be outlived by 32-bit Raspberry 2!

What's the point of it lasting 100 years if it's terribly out of date? An IDE drive from the 2000s is basically unusable today, 20 years later. CPU from around the same era is basically on its last legs because software support is being dropped[1]. Your SSDs are going to suffer the same fate. And that's not even factoring in other considerations like power consumption, and the hassle of trying to connect 30 drives to a computer.

[1] eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18mrxjk/debian_end_o...

I don't use SSDs, but the HDDs in my NAS started failing one by one after a few years. Whenever one failed, I just put a new one in, and that was it. ZFS rebalanced things automatically and I went on with my life.

It just sounds like you spent $3k to solve a problem you could have solved with $200...

Unrelatedly, does the name "Realms of Despair" mean anything to you?

I looked at those, too expensive and hard to use one drive on 30 computers.