Why does the Corsair MP510 1.92TB have 3120 TBW write endurance while similar drives don't?

[Tad Bittoomuch]

I bought three MP510s for a Ghost Canyon ESXi machine and I the reason I did was the high write endurance.

 

On Corsair's product page (https://www.corsair.com/ww/en/Categories/Products/Storage/M-2-SSDs/Force-Series-MP510/p/CSSD-F1920GBMP510#tab-tech-specs) the drive is listed as being manufactured with 3D TLC NAND.

Spoiler

 

If I look at another drive, for example the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, the product page only claims a 1280 TBW endurance, despite also being 2TB and made from 3D TLC NAND as well.

(https://www.xpg.com/us/xpg/583?tab=specification)

Spoiler

Other drives I looked at had a similar endurance to the Adata drive, falling somewhere between 1000 and 1500 TBW.

 

What do Corsair do differently to more than double the write endurance of the same flash technology?

Or, have I misunderstood the marketing and bought the wrong drive?

[Xaring]

Spitballing here: 

Corsair might use 3x the NAND chips.
1.5TB = 3x500GB chips.
Meanwhile, ADATA might just use 1 single higher capacity NAND chips.

Therefore the endurance on 3x the chips is greater.

[Tad Bittoomuch]

Just now, Xaring said:

Spitballing here: 

Corsair might use 3x the NAND chips.
1.5TB = 3x500GB chips.
Meanwhile, ADATA might just use 1 single higher capacity NAND chips.

Therefore the endurance on 3x the chips is greater.

You could be write (ha ha).  It's hard to tell from the product pages how many flash chips are on them because of the stickers and heatsinks covering them up.

[GDRRiley]

ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro
isn't exactly a great drive.
a 2tb samsung 970 plus has warranty of 1,200 TBW vs an 860 pro 2tb at 2,400 TBW

drive "endurance" is mostly about the warranty

[Jurrunio]

Write endurance doesnt mean it wont fail until that point, it just means the company is willing to back you up further than lesser models. From what I've seen other high end 2TB TLC drives like the Samsung 970 Evo or WD SN750 could also easily go over 3k TBW without faults.

[Tad Bittoomuch]

6 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro
isn't exactly a great drive.
a 2tb samsung 970 plus has warranty of 1,200 TBW vs an 860 pro 2tb at 2,400 TBW

drive "endurance" is mostly about the warranty

 

1 minute ago, Jurrunio said:

Write endurance doesnt mean it wont fail until that point, it just means the company is willing to back you up further than lesser models. From what I've seen other high end 2TB TLC drives like the Samsung 970 Evo or WD SN750 could also easily go over 3k TBW without faults.

 

Ah okay, so it's kind of like warranty for a car - 5 years or 100,000km, whichever comes first.  Except in this case it'd be (for the Corsair drive) 5 years or 3120 TBW, whichever comes first.  Suppose it saves them having to replace drives that are only a year old but have been hammered 'cause that'd probably fall outside 'reasonable use'.

 

[NewMaxx]

6 hours ago, Tad Bittoomuch said:

Ah okay, so it's kind of like warranty for a car - 5 years or 100,000km, whichever comes first.  Except in this case it'd be (for the Corsair drive) 5 years or 3120 TBW, whichever comes first.  Suppose it saves them having to replace drives that are only a year old but have been hammered 'cause that'd probably fall outside 'reasonable use'.

Correct.

 

There are a ton of things that impact actual endurance. Flash type (TLC, QLC), flash architecture (BiCS vs. FG vs. TCAT), quality of the flash (FortisFlash vs. FortisMax), overprovisioning, write amplification (from workload, overfull drive), temperature including cross temperature (program to read), ECC (LDPC) and parity, SLC caching configuration (static, dynamic, size), die consistency, presence/lack of DRAM, and much more. Most consumer drives have arbitrary TBW values well below anticipated endurance.

 

From the warranty you can arrive at the drive writes per day (DWPD) value which is more closely linked with anticipated write volume. In any case, the E12 drives (and later, E16) came out with a very high TBW rating for many reasons, although one of which was to compete directly with Samsung's offerings including the 970 PRO (MLC was being phased out). There are drives with genuinely high TBW like Team's T-Create Expert which uses FortisMax (10K P/E) flash, however E12/E12S drives have come with multiple types of flash (64L, 96L, Kioxia, IMFT) so it's safe to say the TBW is arbitrary.

 

Personally I would rate the BiCS the E12 drives originally used as some of the worst flash on the market for endurance.