The SSD Endurance Experiment: 500TB update
 

The 840 Series reported its first reallocated sectors after 100TB of writes, and it's been burning through flash steadily ever since. After 500TB of writes, the 840 Series is up to 1722 reallocated sectors. Meanwhile, the other SSDs have only a handful of flash failures between them. And two of the drives, the Neutron GTX and the HyperX 3K being tested with compressible data, haven't logged a single reallocated sector.

Samsung won't confirm the size of the 840 Series' sectors, but we're pretty sure it's 1.5MB. That means the drive has lost 2.5GB of its total flash capacity already. Fortunately, those flash failures haven't affected the amount of user-accessible capacity. The 840 Series has extra overprovisioned spare area specifically to offset the lower endurance of its TLC NAND. So far, at least, those flash reserves seem to be sufficient.

Although the 840 Series is clearly in worse shape than the competition, these results need to be put into context. 500TB works out to 140GB of writes per day for 10 years. That's an insane amount even for power users, and it far exceeds the endurance specifications of our candidates. The HyperX 3K, which has the most generous endurance rating of the bunch, is guaranteed for 192TB of writes.

http://techreport.com/review/25889/t...t-500tb-update