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Endurance Report February 11, 2011 Endurance Overview Endurance encompasses the x-factor list in SSDs that determines the effective service life of an SSD and defines the amount of written data an SSD’s ability of retentiveness before coming to the end of its rated life. There is no absolute one-to-one relationship between the number of host writes and the actual writes performed to the NAND, and not every NAND block reaches to the end of it’s life (rated maximum number of erases) concurrently. Since SSD endurance relies on the maximum erases for any of the blocks on the NAND, both the write amplification and wear leveling efficiency must be accounted for in determining an expected endurance rating. SSD Endurance Impact List Several factors impact the resulting SSD endurance including the efficiency of the wear leveling algorithms, the write efficiency (as write amplification), the cycling capability of the NAND components, and the nature of the applied workload. Wear Leveling Efficiency Wear leveling efficiency is defined as the ration of the average number of erases on all blocks across the entire SSD to the maximum erases on any block on the NAND. Hence, a formula concluded as below. Write Amplification The amount of data written to the NAND components is usually greater than the amount of data written by the host. A number of different factors contribute to the amount of data written to the NAND exceeding the amount written by the host including such NAND management functions as wear leveling. Write amplification is defined as the amount of data written to the NAND divided by the amount of data written by the host for a given host input stimulus such as below. NAND Cycling Capability At SSD level, the NAND cycling capability will be a combination of the component rating and the SSD controller error correction capabilities. SSD Capacity SSD capacity is the size of the pool of blocks over which the wear is applied. The capa