Highest TBW / Price Ranking for NVMe M.2 SSDs?

[jt532]

I am not as interested in read/write speeds for modern SSDs as they are pretty much all fast enough for my needs. However, I do a lot of writes to SSDs (re-install the OS and copy large files over and over again) and would prefer to maximize their longevity since I intend to use them for as long as possible.

 

Of the consumer NVMe M.2 SSDs available, which have the highest TBW (terabytes written) rating? I'm curious how they rank when using TBW / price as the score.

 

Suggestions?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Reinstalling the os and copying large files won't do anything to hurt the endurance of a modern ssd. I wouldn't worry about endurance here at all. Just get a decent quality brand name drive and your good. 

 

Ive been doing endurance testing on dramless tlc nvme ssds, and have gotten 4 with about 1PB writes, > 4x the rated limit. Your not gonna kill a modern ssd by writing too much.

[NobleGamer]

7 hours ago, jt532 said:

Of the consumer NVMe M.2 SSDs available, which have the highest TBW (terabytes written) rating? I'm curious how they rank when using TBW / price as the score.

 

Suggestions?

One of the cheapest nvme 1tb drives is the Silicon Power P34A60 for $60: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/7tCFf7/silicon-power-a60-1-tb-m2-2280-nvme-solid-state-drive-sp001tbp34a60m28

 

According to their official site, it has 600 TBW per TB of storage.

 

So unless there's a $90 drive with 900 TBW or higher, $120 with 1200 TBW, etc, then it has one of the highest ratios you are looking for.

 

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Reinstalling the os and copying large files won't do anything to hurt the endurance of a modern ssd.

 

It's not likely that OP writes 10 TB per month, which would add up to 600 TB(W) in 5 years (warranty period), but let's at least allow OP to do the math on how quickly they can eat up a drive's decent TBW before we tell them that endurance doesn't matter.

[NewMaxx]

On 10/30/2022 at 4:55 PM, jt532 said:

Of the consumer NVMe M.2 SSDs available, which have the highest TBW (terabytes written) rating? I'm curious how they rank when using TBW / price as the score.

Drives built on Phison's E12 and E16 controllers often have the highest TBW. You didn't mention required capacity which is a factor because larger drives tend to have higher TBW. You also didn't say anything about sustained write performance, although drives with those controllers tend to be lackluster there once the SLC runs out. I should warn you that TBW should not be conflated with reliability whatsoever. Unless you intend to exceed a specific DWPD, extra TBW is often not relevant.

 

If I were to pick a drive specifically for write endurance I would look for a few elements. One, it should have DRAM, as that reduces write amplification. Two, TLC is clearly superior to QLC. Three, drives with large write caches may add wear with sustained writes, but on the other hand drives with smaller caches will hit TLC sooner and random writes in that case will increase wear. Drives that fold will have reduced write amplification since SLC to TLC copies are generally sequential.

 

What those last two mean is that the type of write workload matters! If you're looking at a worst-case scenario, your best bet is to increase effective overprovisioning. About 20% of the raw flash gets you down to a worst-case WAF of 3.0 which I find quite suitable and liable to be <=1.5 for consumer. In other words, simply having extra space free on the drive is useful which does make more capacity useful regardless of TBW.

 

If you are not going to exceed the DWPD, this would mean a drive like the WD Red SN700 NAS SSD, the Seagate equivalent (which they have with E12 and I think E16 too IIRC), something along those lines, unless you need Gen4 performance.

[Mayaa]

On 10/30/2022 at 10:17 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Ive been doing endurance testing on dramless tlc nvme ssds, and have gotten 4 with about 1PB writes, > 4x the rated limit. Your not gonna kill a modern ssd by writing too much.

Im curious how the write speeds are after that, compared to what they were new.

[Electronics Wizardy]

53 minutes ago, Mayaa said:

Im curious how the write speeds are after that, compared to what they were new.

Roughtly the same speeds as new. Probably within 10%, but haven't really checked the data recently.

 

I got anouther 4 more drives to kill, and I have been writing to them for about 9 months now so this is gonna take a while.

[jt532]

22 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Roughtly the same speeds as new. Probably within 10%, but haven't really checked the data recently.

 

I got anouther 4 more drives to kill, and I have been writing to them for about 9 months now so this is gonna take a while.

Would you say this guy's concerns are unreasonable, then? He pointed out a drive which has a significantly higher TBW spec (the Seagate FireCuda) as a drive worth considering when lots of heavy files are being written repeatedly.

 

[maestro0428]

Optane.  

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, jt532 said:

Would you say this guy's concerns are unreasonable, then? He pointed out a drive which has a significantly higher TBW spec (the Seagate FireCuda) as a drive worth considering when lots of heavy files are being written repeatedly.

Most drives will do many times the spec, so I wouldn't worry here. Most users also overestimate the writes there gonna put on their drives.

 

Also how much are you writing? Re-installing the os doesn't do much writes at all(probably like 20-30gb). I don't know what large files your working with but I'd guess the drives endurance won't be a issue.

[ov3rwatch]

On 11/1/2022 at 8:34 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Most drives will do many times the spec, so I wouldn't worry here. Most users also overestimate the writes there gonna put on their drives.

 

Also how much are you writing? Re-installing the os doesn't do much writes at all(probably like 20-30gb). I don't know what large files your working with but I'd guess the drives endurance won't be a issue.

Curious what your final endurance findings were. I need to find the highest TBW non-nvme drives out there full stop regardless of price factor. I have a use case thats burning out Samsung left and right. other tested brands haven't done much better. I get about a year to a year and a half and thats becoming costly. Ended up going back to spinners but now im dealing with excessive speed lag issues on the systems. Hoping I can find a drive with a high enough DWPD/TBW to last at least last 5 years between failures. Looking for something thats 1TB and needs to support at least 8-10DWPD in order to make the cut. The only SSDs i can find that seem to match the specs is the Seagate Nytro 3050 series but ive no idea if this  number is real or if its a marketing gimmick... would love to see real metrics before taking down a system with bunk drives again

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, ov3rwatch said:

Curious what your final endurance findings were. I need to find the highest TBW non-nvme drives out there full stop regardless of price factor. I have a use case thats burning out Samsung left and right. other tested brands haven't done much better. I get about a year to a year and a half and thats becoming costly. Ended up going back to spinners but now im dealing with excessive speed lag issues on the systems. Hoping I can find a drive with a high enough DWPD/TBW to last at least last 5 years between failures. Looking for something thats 1TB and needs to support at least 8-10DWPD in order to make the cut. The only SSDs i can find that seem to match the specs is the Seagate Nytro 3050 series but ive no idea if this  number is real or if its a marketing gimmick... would love to see real metrics before taking down a system with bunk drives again

All the drives are still writing, most with > 1.5PB written to 256GB drives.

 

I'dl look at the intel s3700, s3710 and simmilar. drives. There rated for 10dwpd for 5 years., and gernally pretty solid drives.

 

In additioin to dwpd, look at size. Getting a 8TB drive at 1dwpd is simmilar in endurance to a 800GB drive at 10dwpd, and its easy to get very large drives now.

 

I'm curious what your usecase is

[ov3rwatch]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

All the drives are still writing, most with > 1.5PB written to 256GB drives.

 

I'dl look at the intel s3700, s3710 and simmilar. drives. There rated for 10dwpd for 5 years., and gernally pretty solid drives.

 

In additioin to dwpd, look at size. Getting a 8TB drive at 1dwpd is simmilar in endurance to a 800GB drive at 10dwpd, and its easy to get very large drives now.

 

I'm curious what your usecase is

definitly going to looki into those as well thanks!

Burning them out caching video in Large Scale Surveillance VMS Servers. The footage that comes in from 80+ cameras ends up being written by the VMS to the drives at least twice for caching, once when it comes in via RTSP and gets transcoded from whatever the camera is sending to MKV and then read from the disk when its analyzed for motion detection and rewritten again to disk before being shuttled off to the HDD arrays. I couldn't figure out why I was burning through the OS disks so often until i went and looked at the disk iostat and saw just how much writing was happening (between 70-125MBps [not Mbps] 24x7) The VMS software vendor says theres no way to prevent all the write cycles and recommends spinners because of this but then the spinners aren't fast enough even with 10k sas drives so im losing frames in the footage now which is frustrating. Short of spending thousands to cut the per server load in half duplicating hardware I'm hoping i can find SSDs that i only need to buy once to last several years that i can put on a planned obsolescence schedule. The samsungs actually do pretty well given according to their TBW rating they should burn out much quicker than they do (like 95-124 days) but its costly to keep replacing them constantly when you have 60+ of these servers on a site and when they go out unexpectedly youre having to rebuild the entire os or resilvering from a failing mirror drive.. rather just replace once with a drive that'll actually hold up. No idea how the little off the shelf DVRs dont have these issues but its quite annoying to deal with as an integrator and there arent many real world tests showing real SSD longevity testing sadly.