SSD's are slowly taking over from Spinning
Hard-drives.
Still, being someone who has had experience with my
Thumb Drive failing as detailed in my Geezam
blog article entitled “How
to recover Data from your Damaged Thumb Drive or ZIP
Archive”,
I cannot help but wonder if the same is not true for SSD's being as they’re
based on the same NAND (Not AND) technology.
Well, a surprising new study from Facebook suggest
that it's not frequent use that determines how long SSD last but the
temperature as reported in the article “Want
your SSD to Last? Keep it cool, says new study from Facebook”, published
June 23, 2015 By Brad Bourque, DigitalTrends.
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According to their study published entitled Flash
Memory Failures in the Field at Facebook Facebook revealed that the found
that the SSD Drives that ran the hottest tend to fail the quicker than those
that ran at lower temperatures.
Facebook’s
Study of SSD – The Hotter they are, the Faster they Fail
Facebook is in the perfect situation to notice this,
as they run and maintain their own Server farms made up of hundred of SSD
connected together in massive RAID configurations.
SSD are indeed made of the same flash memory but
specially designed to endure more read/write operations before the cell that
make up the NAND memory modules begin to fail. When this occurs, the cell has
experience burnout and at that point, the cell cannot coherently store Data.
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As a home user, you wouldn't notice this, unless you
constantly engage in activities that read and write Data to your Hard-drive,
such as doing a lot of graphics-intensive Games like those described in my Geezam blog article entitled “How
to connect Xbox One controller to any Computer or Laptop”.
In an Enterprise Server setting like Facebook's own
Server farm where they host the counts of millions of persons worldwide, their
SSD undergoes hundreds of read/write operations daily, so they were in the
perfect position to do this study. As the SSD's fail, they have to quickly
backup Data and replace the SSD with new ones as cell that have incoherent Data
can affect Data Integrity.
During the Early detection phase of the operation of
a SSD when it first starts to fail, the memory controller tracks Data loss. It
then earmarks which cells are not coherently reading/writing Data, mitigating
against Data failures for a while. Eventually, as more and more of the SSD's
cells begin to fail, the entire drive is replaced before it becomes de-coherent.
If you have Data backed up on External Hard-drives
that are SSD’s as recommended in my Geezam
blog article “How to
do Physical Backup using DVD and CD and a Listing of the best software Burning
DVD and CD’s” they will be safe once you keep the External SSD Stored in a
cool place.
SSD
Makers need Cooling Systems – CNT, Quartz, Silicene as Diamonds are Forever
Storage
Hopefully manufacturer's of SSD's for use in Server
settings like Samsung and Hitachi will read this study and explore the use of
better cooling Systems.
One such I’d recommend is as Dr. James E. Smith Jr
of the UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) and his team's implementation
of a Passive Cooling System for Processors using 3M's Fluorinert FC-72 as
described in my blog
article entitled “UAH
Graduate Students use 3M's Fluorinert FC-72 in Passive Cooling System – Gaming
Rigs and Data Centers Noiseless Cooling Systems upgrade”.
Most likely, it can be modified to cool SSD’s as
well, thereby extending their lifespan and potentially reducing read/write
errors.
By then, other more permanent forms of storage would
have been developed that have a longer lifespan and are unaffected by
temperature, possibly based on CNT (Carbon Nanotubes), Quartz Crystal or even
Silicene as explained in my blog article
entitled “@UTAustin
at Austin develops Silicene Transistors - How to grow Silicene and Group 4
Super-conducting Processors and
Batteries on Silver Spoon” as Diamonds are
forever!
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