Question

I wanted to buy the new Intel X-25m g2 (80/160 GB) drives, and before I bought that I wanted to know what is the average life span of these drives.

I know that the SLC drives last over 40-50 years, but they are way expensive. I need to use these drives in a server environment, with around 5-10 GB of writes and 40-50 GB of reads every day.

I googled around but didn't find any definitive answer about the lifespan of these drives, only form posts discussing it.

I need at least a 10 year average life expectancy for these drives (the existing SCSI drive in my server is 7 years old) and was wondering whether the MLC drive would be sufficient for me, or I need to shell out the big bucks for the SLC one. Space is not really an issue, as I just need around 30 GB of disk space, so even a 32 GB drive would probably be ok, it's the lifespan that I'm more concerned with.

Thanks,

Jalpesh

Answer 1

I'm afraid even if the official lifetime expectancy was available, only the time will show what the real lifespan is. Nobody can guarantee you 10 years on a fresh new technology right now.

Answer 2

Here's an article about just that topic:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

tl/dr: With current technologies write endurance is not a factor you should be worrying about.