In the previous post, I discussed how much data was written and read to and from the SSDs in my bare metal server in a data center over the course of a year. While this is my main server, I do have additional smaller servers at home for other purposes. One serves as redundancy for some of my services so that in case that server in the data center fails, I can recover from it quickly by temporarily switching over to the backup server. In these servers I have SSDs that are 6 and 8 years old, so they’ve been around for a while.
Let’s start to have a look at the server at home that I use as a warm standby server and backup location for some of my services such as my Nextcloud instances. In addition, I run some private services on it, like a Mediawiki for my notes. While I’ve exchanged the server hardware over the years, I still use a 2 TB SSD I put into operation 6 years ago. The power-on hours reported by smartctl is 5.7 years (49.844 hours). Smartctl reports that over that time span, 91 TB of data was written to the drive and 40.8 TB were read from it. Compared to the 43 TB written on my main server in a single year (see previous post), that is not much. The datasheet of the drive gives an endurance of 500 TB written to the drive. So, if it came down to this, I could run the drive for another 25 years. Sounds reassuring.
In addition, I have another little server I mainly use as yet another backup and spare. In this server, I use a 1 TB SSD which in the meantime has accumulated 74.593 power-on hours, which is 8.5 years! Smartctl states that 14 TB of data were written to the drive over that time. That is very little compared to drive’s endurance of 150 TB written as per the drive’s data sheet.
Overall, I was surprised that when it comes to endurance vs. data written, even the SSD in my ‘high load’ server is good for another 15 years. The drives in my other servers will last even longer, at least from a flash cell point of view. It’s much more likely, then, that the electronics of the drive rather than the flash cells will fail at some point.