Ray Lucchesi of RayOnStorage Blog comments:
Flash field experience at Google
In a FAST’16 article I recently read (Flash reliability in production: the expected and unexpected, see p. 67), researchers at Google reported on field experience with flash drives in their data centers, totaling many millions of drive days covering MLC, eMLC and SLC drives with a minimum of 4 years of production use (3 years for eMLC). In some cases, they had 2 generations of the same drive in their field population. SSD reliability in the field is not what I would have expected and was a surprise to Google as well.
The SSDs seem to be used in a number of different application areas but mainly as SSDs with a custom designed PCIe interface (FusionIO drives maybe?). Aside from the technology changes, there were some lithographic changes as well from 50 to 34nm for SLC and 50 to 43nm for MLC drives and from 32 to 25nm for eMLC NAND technology.
If you want a good sample size, you can’t beat a company like Google. They store everything.
Read more at: Surprises from 4 years of SSD experience at Google
