Solid State Drives
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Endurance Rating
What it Means and How it Applies to PNY PREVAIL Series SSDs
Endurance Ratings
Flash is typically manufactured to a spec ranging from hundreds to
thousands of P/E cycles. The higher the endurance rating, the longer
lasting the flash is and the less likely you are to wear it out.
• Today, consumer grade flash can range from
500 – 3000 cycles or 0.5K – 3K
• Compute and Enterprise grade flash ranges from 5K – 10K
These numbers might seem low and using the lowest consumer rating
as an example, you would think that anyone can easily hit 500 cycles,
but this number is assigned to each block of flash. To put this into
perspective the lowest density flash chips today have a capacity of 4GB
which is made up of over 31,000 blocks of flash. For a 120GB SSD that
translates to over 930,000 blocks of flash. Each one of those blocks
would need to be written and erased 500 times before it wears out.
Endurance Linked to Usage
Consumer Grade: Storage Drive Used for Mostly Reading Data,
Some Writing:
A typical user with a laptop, desktop or mobile device surfing the web,
streaming music and video, or running programs are performing read
operations. A user would be writing data while running their operating
system, installing programs, transferring data to their system or saving
files. For this type of user an SSD with a rating from 1K to 3K should last
10 years or more.
Compute and Enterprise Grade: Storage Drive Used for Mostly
Writing Data, Some Reading:
If someone is running an enterprise server or workstation they’re typically
running larger programs or performing various transactions which require
more writes. For this group 5K to 10K rated SSDs would be able to
withstand this type of data throughput.
The higher up you go on the endurance scale, the higher reliability.
Side Note:
The JEDEC standard is JESD218: Since the endurance rating is defined
in terms of the amount of data an SSD can write, it can be measured in
two ways:
1. As a total of all the bytes written/erased (X amount of terabytes or
petabytes) before the drive fails
2. P/E cycles
For total bytes written, you can think of it as the 100,000 mile Powertrain
warranty on cars which gives you an idea on how long a car will last.
Same principle here, for example on average a 120GB SSD with 3K rating
would have a lifetime rating of 375TB while a 120GB SSD rated at 10K
would have a lifetime rating of 1.5PB.
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Features and specifications subject to change without notice. The PNY logo are registered trademarks of PNY Technologies, Inc.
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Updated 04.12.12
What is Endurance
Also known as the P/E cycle rating which means “Program and Erase”
cycle, the endurance rating is defined by JEDEC - the standards body for
the solid state industry.
Program and Erase is the full cycle of writing data to flash cells and then
erasing them to bring the cells back to their “empty” state. You can only
do this a limited amount of times because the wear and tear of writing
and erasing eventually wears out the flash cell. The reading of data is a
much less intense process and doesn’t affect the life of the flash.
As the flash cell starts to wear out the write speed of the flash slows
down so it takes longer to write and erase. As an end user you would
notice the SSD write speed slowing down until eventually you could no
longer write any data to the drive. The drive wouldn’t crash, you would
only be able to read data from it.
The endurance rating was created as a number to reflect the amount of
times you can write and erase to a single block of flash before it wears
out.