Hacker News Reader

Comment by mfringel | Hacker News Reader

Being able to set it up as 10TB with 3x the life would be even better, because it makes other write-intensive applications feasible with an SSD, with the firmware handling the wear accounting in the background.

ETA: Specifically, having the option to do so, and having it happen transparently in firmware.

View on HN

The market doesn't want products advertised this way. Setting up a 30TB SSD as a 10TB with 3X the endurance is an easily solvable issue in host software. But selling a 30TB as a 10TB, while demanding 3X the price of a 10TB despite the high endurance is a gargantuan challenge

I dunno, we on the Enterprise side have always ponied up for the longer-lasting and far more expensive SLC based drives.

I know two datacenters in switzerland that instead go "the cheap way". For them, if a drive lasts 4 years instead of 8, it doesn't really matter, as in 4 years, drives will de better and consume less.

Your redundancy must be top notch though.

No doubt. I'd still like to option to have high-endurance handled transparently in firmware.

You don't get extra life that way; the total number of gigabytes you can write (including rewrites) is the same.

FTLs are nonlinearly more efficient with more free space (like how GCs are more efficient with more heap available), but exactly how much extra endurance this translates to would depend on the particular SSD and generally isn't documented.

For example, Micron has an 11 TB SSD with 16 PB endurance and a 6.4 TB SSD (that may have ~11 TB of flash) with 35 PB, so giving up 40% capacity gives 120% extra endurance.

No, that's incorrect. A naive write-balancing algorithm might concentrate writes into a small subset of sectors when free space is low, but a properly designed firmware will move things around to prevent that from happening. And in any case, that's a matter of free space, not total space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com