Facebook’s Study of SSD's and CNT, Quartz, Silicene and Diamonds are Forever Storage

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. 

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.

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!