A year and a half ago, PC hardware blog TechReport set out to test the endurance of consumer SSDs by writing data to them and checking for errors ad nauseum. The results speak for themselves: The first drives to fail didn’t start showing errors until 300TB of data, and the first true failure was at 700TB, while a Samsung drive managed to reach 2.4 petabytes of data written before collapsing from exhaustion.
Along with the results, TechReport published a set of lyrics for a cover of I Will Survive from the point of view of the winning Samsung drive. What started as a fun distraction at the end of a grueling data gauntlet took on a life of its own, and now Samsung is even in on the fun. The video brings the enchanting song of the SSD to life, thanks to Anders Graham, a member of the Samsung product marketing team. In addition, Samsung released a short late night interview-style video talking to Graham about his performance and the TechReport study.
Distractions aside, the results of the TechReport study on SSD endurance are both important and informative. The amount of data written to these drives in over a year is far more than most consumers will write to their drive in its lifetime. It’s also worth noting that while some of the drives issued warnings about errors and failures before becoming unresponsive, the Samsung didn’t, passing a clean bill of health on the drive before sudden failure.
Even the TechReport conclusion admits the sample size is too small to say Samsung SSDs are the best across the board, but it’s still useful to see a breakdown of exactly what SSD failure looks like and how long it takes to occur. Clearly these drives were meant to last, and hopefully the SSDs installed in our own systems will last as long.
