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Comment by smiley1437 | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to find a decent endurance NVME in the m.2 form factor for write-heavy applications and it appears that true 2-bit MLC has all but disappeared, replaced by 3-bit TLC and higher (with commensurate loss of endurance)

The high endurance SSDs appear to be only available in u.2\u.3\hhhl and god-help-me EDSFF form factors

Any suggestions? Micron's 7450 isn't readily available

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They don't really make them anymore, but you can still get m.2 form factor Intel Optane SSDs in the 900/905P series, example[0]. They have insane endurance specs. Their performance is also still awesome, especially for random reads/writes[1]. I wish they had continued making them. Most PC builders just bought crappy Samsung SSDs this whole time, ignoring these awesome (and high priced) drives.

> Life Expectancy 1.6 million hours Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

> Lifetime Endurance4 10 Drive Writes per Day (DWPD)

There was one update, but I don't believe it's m.2? [2]

0: https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-ssd-905p-series-380gb/p/...

1: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ (sort by "Avg Bench" and you'll see these old Optanes still in the top 10)

2: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/memory...

> Most PC builders just bought crappy Samsung SSDs this whole time, ignoring these awesome (and high priced) drives.

Ha, you can't blame the consumer.

Great tech but expensive and locked to intel. Nobody was going back to the blue evil just because they had a really random reads and writes for the enterprise market.

Isn't userbenchmark the site that had them artificially giving Intel/nvidia better scores on GPU and CPU metrics?

Same one. Assume malice, cluelessness, or both when someone cites "scores" from that place

Most PCs experience very little write load; I can imagine that many of them experience less than one full drive write per lifetime.

A database server box, or even a CI build box, is a whole different business.

WD RED SSDs are targeted at NAS use cases and claim endurance of 1PBW per TB, https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-red-sn700-review

You may also want to ask over on reddit in /r/newMaxx. Good place for SSD info and there is a pinned post for asking questions like this

NewMaxx SSD references: http://ssd.borecraft.com/

Why not get a U.2 drive and an adapter like this one https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/m2e4sff8643

Didn't know such a thing existed, thank you!

While it's true that MLC is mostly dead, you might want to consider a higher capacity TLC ssd. If you double your capacity, you double the endurance since SSD endurance is in drive writes per day, and a bigger SSD will likely have a bigger SLC cache to help with the write speed.

Yep, you can even adjust the overprovisioning manually (at least for Samsung). So if you need more endurance (and improved random write performance) just buy bigger capacity and increase the over provisioning allocation. Found this good summary about it with graphs showing the impact of it:

https://www.atpinc.com/blog/over-provisioning-ssd-benefits-e...

As long as you're using a filesystem Samsung understands? When I overprovisioned my 860, windows showed that the partition didn't fill the drive. When I decreased the size of the partition in windows, Samsung Magician showed that the overprovisioning had increased. While I'm not sure how the drive itself deals with overprovisioning, Magician certainly detects it based on the size of the partition.

2 -> 3 bit cells is a 1.5x capacity bump.

i would not be shocked to find tlc has a >1.5x impact on dwpd.

But it might be easier to find e.g. a 3x sized TLC compared to a 1x size MLC in the FF that GP wants.

For a simple example, the 970 pro (MLC) had a 1200 drive write warrenty, while the 980 pro (TLC) only has a 600 drive write warranty, but the 2TB 980 pro is cheaper than the 1 TB 970 pro so you can get the same endurance for less.

Seems weird that only 2TBs fail then

This sounds like a firmware bug that has nothing to do with endurance.

Use larger drives and use RAID to distribute writes over more drives. Accept that a TLC drive heavily used for writes is a consumable and act accordingly.

i recommend samsung pm9a3 versions. not as popular, but are enterprise products and also the endurance is like 3 times 980 pro i believe (please check it, not 100% sure).

Been using in my threadrupper workstation with a lot of vms which are put to sleep every day with around .25tb written and read each time the vms are started. keep in mind these are 22110 form factor

These are not available with retail support so if you manage to acquire one (which may have been pulled from service with an unknown level of previous wear) you will get ZERO support from Samsung no matter what goes wrong.

well i bought from digitec here in switzerland and they take care of warranty. other than that i don't expect any support from any ssd vendor.

I rely on the physical store i buy from where i live. that's the reason i only buy either physically or from amazon germnay (their support had been rock solid in the last 10 years i had been using them).

SR-IOV support?

Any firmware issue? (https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/pm9a3-firm...)

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