Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

A victory in SSD endurance has Samsung singing

Brad Bourque
By
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.

Recommended Videos

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.

Related

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.

Check out this Interview on the incredible endurance of Samsung SSDs.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Brad Bourque
Brad Bourque
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad Bourque is a native Portlander, devout nerd, and craft beer enthusiast. He studied creative writing at Willamette…
Samsung’s Odyssey Neo G9 launches in October — if you can stomach its insane price
Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 (2023) playing a racing simulator.

Samsung's hotly anticipated Odyssey Neo G9 is arriving in October with an eye-watering $2,500 price tag. The monitor was first revealed in January, and Samsung has been making the rounds with its flagship display since then.

The release and pricing announcement is timed with this week's Gamescom, and comes a couple of months after Samsung opened reservations for the Odyssey Neo G9. Come October, you'll be able to purchase the monitor directly from Samsung or "at select U.S. retailers," according to Samsung's press release. Samsung hasn't yet confirmed the exact date the monitor will arrive.

Read more
It’s time to stop trying to play games without an SSD
stop trying to play games without an ssd dt respec

Everyone owes Sony an apology. When the PS5 was announced and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was shown off as exclusive for the platform, there was a barrage of finger-pointing at Sony over the game's next-gen exclusive status. The argument from Sony was that the game required the PS5's world-class storage interface, and anything less simply wouldn't work.

Now that the game is available on PC, I can see exactly what Sony was referencing. As you can see from Digital Foundry's first look at the game, it simply doesn't work on the PS4's slow, 5,400RPM hard drive.

Read more
Samsung’s Odyssey OLED 49 arrives cheaper than expected
The Samsung Odyssey OLED 49 in a blue-tinted room.

Samsung's much-anticipated Odyssey OLED 49 finally has a price -- a week after reservations opened with no price in sight. The monitor is available to preorder now for $2,200. That's pricey, even for what could be one of the best gaming monitors on the market, but it's cheaper than the monitor it's replacing.

The Odyssey Neo G9 launched with a list price of $2,300, so the Odyssey OLED 49 is actually $100 cheaper. It's tough to say if Samsung will maintain that list price for long, though -- after all, the Neo G9 now sells for closer to $1,700, and the Odyssey OLED 49 is still expensive no matter how you slice it.

Read more