[Beowulf] SSD prices - q: how many writes/erases???

[Jeff Layton]

Nifty Tom Mitchell wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 04:35:26PM +0100, Peter Jakobi wrote:
>   
>
> Sun and Micron recently reported a million plus cycles for a single level flash
> product.  Current shipping product is on the order of 100000 cycles.
>   

 From what I understand these were cherry picked parts from
a normal production run. Has anyone heard if this is a new
production process or a new concept in SSDs? BTW - Samsung
has reported 500K rewrites from cherry picked parts.

If they are cherry picked, then it's not really a turning point
in SSDs. It also bothers me that a normal production run can
have parts with rewrites at 100K and 1M. Sounds like there
are some variabilities that can't be controlled.

Don't forget that 100K rewrites are SLC products and MLC's
are general 10K. Although the Intel drives state 100K with
MLC (and pretty decent performance). I'm not sure of the
magic in the Intel drives though. Could be over provisioning
but I don't know for sure. Anyone care to comment?

Jeff