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Comment by b33j0r | Hacker News Reader

The thing that still bothers me is that the read-write cycles and lifetime are sort of unpredictable to me personally.

For an analogy, I only buy LED lightbulbs, love that tech. When they first became widely-available, my house had a few incandescent bulbs on the porch that I probably just left on for 5 years.

The supposedly superior led bulbs in that adoption period often died surprisingly fast, compared to the claims.

To bring it back to storage. I use as much NVMe as I can, but I’m still a bit uncertain on how much a risk I’m taking with my filesystem choice and access patterns.

My answer: buy more SSDs when they go on sale! I don’t have intuition about lifetime even now.

I know, HDDs have equivalent classes of worse problems. I just learned to expect them to reliably fail, like a few days after a build ;)

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  $ sudo smartctl -A /dev/nvme0n1

  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          10%
  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    626,936 [320 GB]
  Data Units Written:                 22,262,139 [11.3 TB]

This is on a few months old PC which is why percentage used is still 0%. The number does slowly go up over time especially if you do heavy writing.

As with LED lightbulbs, the consumer industry is focused on costcutting to deliver shitty products at low prices. Any high quality SSD is more than adequate for consumer use. Main thing to look at is how many layers the flash has. SLC is pretty much not available in consumer products. Triple layer is very adequate. All the cheap products have four layer, which you don't want unless you know you're not going to be writing often.

Firmware bugs or bad controllers are still a potential issue. I have a 1.5 year old drive which is at something like 65% percentage used, it's a big drive with a high TBW rating and only a moderate amount of data written to it, but the excessive wear is known issue with that model. It'll get replaced under warranty but that's only kicking the can down the road since the replacement will have the same issue.

That was a very well-thought out comment, and I learned new things! Thanks!

The strange thing to me that gives me weird feels despite the science is that I’m never had an ssd die that I installed. And I’m no Linus of LTT here.

Plenty of apple machines and etc have needed a catastrophic replacement. That just throws off my ability to make rational decisions about it at times.

“Dude! That SSD was premium priced, what the heck? Thermal failure?”

(Seems likely, but ugh. Note: Opinion was formed a few years back, so it’s not something I’m actively diagnosing.)

The recent issues with Samsung's SSD's don't help with those feelings I'm sure. I have a WD-Black 1TB SSD in my system that I built in 2018 and I used it heavily all day long and I have not suffered any issues from the SSD. I also used a MacBook Pro from early 2013 and only recently sold it still going strong with it's SSD (proprietary). I read recently that some HDD were starting to have reliability problems after a few years.

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