How long do modern consumer SSDs actually last? Longer than you’d expect!

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Almost a year ago, The Tech Report set out to answer a question: Exactly how much hammering could modern SSDs take? The site put together a comprehensive stress test that would hammer the drives with a variety of data, commit hundreds of terabytes of writes, and then continue using the drives until they died. This week, the experiment crossed the petabyte line — or at least three of the original drives (down from six) did.

Tech Report’s test set of six drives was never large enough to draw conclusions about which SSDs were more reliable; the goal was to analyze how the drives would fail, how many terabytes of writes they could sustain, and what the failure modes would look like. Would they drop out gracefully with plenty of warning time, or would they calamitously collapse?