As one of the first manufacturers of SSD's Samsung sells drives with TLC memory. Thise NAND flash memory chips come a much lower price per gigabyte but unfortunately their lifespan is also lower. Instead of 3'000 P/E-cycles, like you get it from 20nm MLC NAND flash you get 1'000 P/E-cycles. For Hardware.info this was reason enough to check out how long it takes until the 250 Gigabyte SSD 840 starts dying. The results are quite surprising.

According to the measurements conducted by Hardware.info, the drive started to report bad sectors after 2'945 read/write cycles were conducted. This is almost three times as much as Samsung promises the drive would last. In other words this means that 779'538 Gigabyte had to be written until the first serious issues occured.

If you now keep in mind that it is widly accepted, that the average consumer will struggle to write more than 10 Gigabyte per day, this means that this drive would last 77'953.8 days or in another number 213.57 years before serious issues have to be expected.

Furthermore there is an interesting comment from a user over at Hardware.info. He mentioned that not only the bad sectors can occur but also data retion can be a problem. The more P/E-cylce to more likely it becomes that after a system has been powered down for like a day or two the SSD can't read the data anymore. He also added that maybe Hardware.info should turn off the system for a bit longer. Nevertheless the tester over at Hardware.info started to turn off the system after seven weeks of endurance testing and at the moment he's checking at which point data retention is becoming an issue.

Link to the test at Hardware.info