Our consultants say that the flash cells of MLC SSDs wear out too fast for this application, citing 3000 program-erase cycles. To my knowledge enterprise multi-level cells like in the Intel s3700 should last 10.000 to 30.000 cycles. If you do a simplified calculation for 10 disk writes per day for 5 years then you get 10 x 365 x 5 = 18250 cycles. Ok there is no over provisioning or write amplification included in this simplified calculation.
One of the other statements was that when one disk in the array fails, additional load could easily wear out the remaining disks early. Since the data for the missing disk is just calculated from the parity information I do not see this point.
Has anybody deployed the s3700 in heavy load application for several months?
Best regards
Thomas
