1 PB SSD Endurance Test: Results and Analysis of Multiple Drives

This article, originally published on June 19, 2014 by TechReport, continues the SSD continuous‑write endurance test that began four months earlier with a 600 TB data point, now reaching the 1 PB (1000 TB) milestone.

The drives under test were:

Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB

Intel SSD 335 240 GB

Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB (two units, one with compressible data, one with incompressible data)

Samsung 840 250 GB

Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB

So far, three drives have failed, each for different reasons.

First failure – Kingston HyperX 3K (incompressible data) : The drive wrote 728 TB before the first warning at 700 TB, received another warning at 725 TB, and finally became unusable after a SMART export, with the wear‑leveling index (MWI) dropping to zero.

The MWI, not the number of reallocated sectors, indicates remaining SSD life; it fell to 10 at 700 TB and to 0 at 728 TB.

Second failure – Intel SSD 335 : After reaching 700 TB the SMART warning appeared, but the drive continued to work until 750 TB, when the Anvil Storage Utilities tool reported write errors and the drive stopped responding. The MWI reached zero at 700 TB, and SMART data ceased entirely, leaving the drive in a read‑only, self‑destruct mode.

Third failure – Samsung 840 : Although the drive survived past 900 TB, it began showing a large number of unrecoverable errors between 800‑900 TB, after which it vanished from the system without prior warning, and SMART logs were lost.

All three drives that survived to 1 PB were the Corsair Neutron GTX, Samsung 840 Pro, and the compressible‑data Kingston HyperX 3K, despite their advertised TBW ratings being well below 200 TB.

Performance testing showed that most drives maintained stable 4 MB sequential read/write and 4 KB random read/write speeds throughout the test, with occasional spikes or drops near the end of life. The Neutron GTX remained the most stable, though its last sequential read test showed a sharp decline.

In conclusion, reaching 1 PB demonstrates that modern SSDs can sustain heavy write workloads far beyond their rated endurance, with most maintaining good performance until failure, and that wear‑leveling index is a more reliable indicator of SSD health than reallocated sector count.