Breaking Intel's 600p NVMe SSD: Endurance Pushed To The Limit

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I usually have lots and lots of tabs open on Firefox (currently 46), and some of them stay there for days. The problem is on your end for sure.
 
Depends on which sites, I'm sure. Do you run ad block? I'm sure a good amount of it is from ads.

It happens on every PC I use. I don't go to sketchy sites (seriously, one of these is a work PC, behind a big, corporate firewall) and have McAfee malware protection. I/O Writes correlates directly with open tabs. As I close them down, the I/O Writes quiet down & so does my CPU.

I think you guys just aren't looking.
 
Other software can write a lot of data as well. The music services often send data to buffer and the temp folders balloon to 4GB or more in a few hours.
 


I do run an adblocker, but disable it on sites I trust or want to support.

The SSD counts the host writes. It's not like Firefox has any special way to hide it.
 
I don't know about anyone else but I have spinning-disk hard drives that are over 5 years old, and I would expect any SSD to last longer than that. And the only reason I'd replace the drive would be to add more capacity - which I probably wouldn't actually replace a drive to do, I'd just add it in as storage and keep my boot drive the same.

So, no, not buying an Intel 600p, even if my use-case means I won't I won't likely use it up before I want to replace it.
 
You know, it's funny. When I first started using SSDs, I'd put the OS on them and not much else. Then, as more information came to light about their reliability, I decided to use larger drives & overprovisioning (which I've had mixed success with, recently) to give myself a bit more confidence.

As Paul Alcorn has stated (I don't know if it's in any articles on this site, or just elsewhere + forum comments), that SSDs can write a lot more data in their lifetimes than HDDs. Given this point, the only argument in favor of using HDDs instead, would be if you're trying to reduce the amount of data written by virtue of HDDs' slower speed. This might come into play, sometimes, but given the data rate of the writes concerning me, I think it wouldn't help.

In any case, I'd rather go for a quiet, power-efficient, non-mechanical solution. So, though overprovisioning and larger capacity drives, I'm all in for SSDs. The only exception is my media/backup server, which has a RAID 6 of mechanical disks. That's purely due to $/GB and because I don't need the speed of SSDs. It's not running, most of the time.

Prefetch doesn't hurt anything, because it's reading. As long as you have some RAM to spare, you'll do slightly better with prefetch enabled.

I'd imagine the page file doesn't see a lot of use, unless you're running low on free RAM. It'd be interesting to see some actual data on this (does anyone know of a way?).
 
That is a horrible SSD for the money, especially compared to the endurance of other budget SSDs in the past.
Don't think of SSDs are just price per GB, instead also take into account the cost per endurance.

A drive with 90% less endurance for $10-20 less, is not worth it.

Just doing basic stuff like gaming, image editing, and video editing, is putting around 50-60TB of writes per year on my Samsung 850 pro, It is still alive after over 150TB of writes, and if the endurance ends up being anything like the 840 pro, then it should be able to survive + petabytes.

With the measured endurance in the article, it is likely that Intel is using some of the lowest binned TLC flash. Usually NAND companies save the bottom of the barrel NAND for flash drives, but it seems intel decided to turn it into an overpriced SSD.
 


You're doing a heck of a lot more than "basic stuff" if you're putting that many writes into the SSD per year. I'm barely at 25 TB on my boot drive after nearly 4½ years, and I'm a relatively heavy user.

Anyway, bear in mind that endurance ratings have little to do with the actual endurance of the drive.
 


The read only mode failure state is a major issue with SSDs, flash drives, and SD cards. The problem stems from there being no user option to disable it, thus if you want to RMA the drive under warranty, if it was not encrypted, then whoever checks the drive, will have access to all of your info. It makes dealing with the warranty, much harder since you now have to trust people you don't know, not to do anything malicious with your data. Since I keep regular backups, it is a function I would like to disable,or at least have the read only state, a function where a special utility can disable it after all data is recovered,and you just want to securely erase everything.

When the drive is in a read only mode, you can still copy the data from it without much issue as long as you are not trying to boot from it.
 
I don't know how many drives have Secure Erase, these days, but to erase such drives doesn't involve writing them. You just change the decryption key, and the drive's contents can no longer be read.

I don't know if that's what you had in mind by "encrypted", because the encryption in Secure Erase drives is transparent to the user.

Hopefully, drives still allow that, in read-only mode. The key is stored inside the controller, rather than on the flash, itself (so that people can't just transplant the NAND chips to another board, to circumvent it).
 


For the ones that I have seen the issues on, you could not even do that. the device is essentially frozen whatever state it decides to go into read only mode for. Any factory reset utility used, will not change anything, thus you are stuck sending a drive full of potentially personal info to the company for warranty replacement.

This is another reason why I try to avoid the cheap ones for a system drive, and tend to use them for caching and steam games for a few weeks before I use it as a system drive.

I still buy budget SSDs, for example, I have a 240GB Sandisk SSD+ (cheap on a black Friday sale a while back) that is used as a steam games folder. If it does fail within the warranty period and goes read only, all they will see on it, are steam games.

 
My 600p 1TB failed on the very first day. I copied my steam library to the drive and multiple corrupted files were found. I tried recovering those files, but they became corrupted again few minutes after recovery. No error was shown in the Intel SSD toolbox but a drive fail error was shown in HWinfo64. I returned my drive and bought a PM961 1TB instead for just a little bit more £. Much much better. No errors and much faster.
 
Not writing to the SSD doesn't mean that the SSD wouldn't normally
write internally.

Perhaps Intel is afraid that errors on read that normally
would require rewriting will not be handled correctly by the software, so they
lock access to the drive. However, if they haven't included a way to recover
the data, even if it requires a special program or hardware, they made
a mistake.

They also should be able to erase the data, both by destroying a key
and as user option actually erasing the data.
 


There have also been philosophical disagreements about this. My machine may be more responsive with swap on the SSD. The machine is here to serve me, not for me to work around hardware shortcomings. So I accept the wear. Some think it's a foolish waste of money wearing out the SSD. Some think it gives faster performance. Some think that I should get more memory!
 
From now on, irrespective of the performance of the drive, if the manufactures do not put in any effort in their packaging, eg putting in some spare screws, I won't buy it. Let face it, it's not a cheap product.
 

In your Breaking Intel's 600p NVMe SSD: Endurance Pushed To The Limit, you say "In The Real World" section, "The Intel 600p includes a five-year warranty, but we suspect most users will replace the drive within that time."

In February 2014, I installed a SanDisk Extreme II 480GB SSD. Here is my install video, see the first and last 2 minutes. I use my system 12 hours a day almost everyday for general business purposes. I have occasionally done video editing and rendering but they are stored on the HDD, not the SSD.

The SMART stats from HD Tune Pro 5.60 say I have used the SanDisk SSD for 11,591 hours (Power On Hours Count). I have been careful to move most common nonO/S writing to the secondary HDD. This includes both IE and FF browser caches. For the SSD, LifeTime Writes are only 130 GB and LifeTime Reads are only 256GB over 3 years. This does seem a little low to me but that's what the SMART stats say.

I intend to use my SanDisk SSD until it fails, which will probably be many more years. While I am more experienced at tuning Windows than most, I think most other buyers of SSD's will also use them until they stop working. Since SSD's have no mechanical parts as HDD's do, I suspect most SSD's will continue to be utilized by their owners until the motherboard fails. This would be a very long time, longer than 5 years.
 


I think most people will stop using the SSD when they either want more storage space, or are upgrading to a new PC that won't support the old SSD. In most cases, that will happen long before the SSD runs out of write endurance.
 


Keep in mind that the prefetcher in Windows 8 and 10 detects if you're running an SSD and behaves differently than with an HDD. The programmers at Microsoft aren't living under a rock. They're well aware of this newfangled SSD technology.

My 850 Evo has seen about 13 TB of writes over 1 year and 3 months. I've been using it quite heavily, not really trying to avoid writes, sometimes temporarily copying large amounts of data to the SSD for example, because it's much faster than copying it to my HDD. I figure if I paid a premium for SSD storage, I might as well use it. At this rate it will last just over 14 years, and I think around the year 2029, I won't be using a 500 GB SATA SSD...
 
The SM871 is a SATA SSD so you have several options. CrystalDisk Mark will show the amount of writes in megabytes (hover over for GB/TB). HDD Sentinel is my new favorite. SSD Life is another one. SSD-Z is progressing along, too.
 


Uhh, I don't even know where to start or end with that. Write some data to your high-speed Extreme II. It's a really good, very fast drive and it loves to write data.

Just to clarify, the replace in 5 year comment is much deeper than someone may write too much data to it. In fact, there are many users that will not write half of the allowed data to the drive over 5 years. Keep in mind that we should see PCIe 4.0 within 5 years and over that time we will also see high capacity NVMe SSDs selling for very low prices. Five years ago we talked about the second generation SandForce SSDs with the SF2200 flash processor. 240GB drives sold for $450+. and 120GB models like the Mushkin Chronos sold for $260.

How many people still run Mushkin Chronos, Kingston HyperX (original blue model), Intel SSD 520, Patriot Wildfire, and other similar SSDs today?
 
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