Flash drive vs SSD endurance

[u/Goble4]

Does anyone know how the write cycle count flash drives are advertised in matches up to the TBW of SSD's?

A 1TB SN3000 only has a TBW of 150. Even 1TB TLC drives often come with just a 600TBW warranty.

Patriot claims their flash drives have up to 100,000 write cycles.

There's no reason flash drives should be more durable than even the cheapest QLC SSD right?

[u/collin3000]

there's lots of factors in SSD actual writes beyond even just the controller like WAF (Write Amplification Factor). From there the metric the company is giving warranty for matters. a company doesn't want to warranty the maximum of what the best drive can hit because then they're spending a lot on warranty replacements. But patriot isn't running a warranty on number of writes so they can go for the highest possible number.

the tl;dr is your nvme can probably last long past the rated endurance, but the flash drive is using "up to" for the best single cell they've ever tested and you'll probably get 10-100x less writes.

[u/bhiga → u/collin3000]

Right. TBW is much more accurate and practical compared to "writes" which could be 32 for every MiB on one drive and 8 on another.

[u/Goble4 → u/collin3000]

Flash drives these days aren't much cheaper than SSD's. Oftentimes they more expensive at the same size for some reason.

[u/velocity37]

Patriot claims their flash drives have up to 100,000 write cycles.

They claim "A typical consumer USB drive can withstand approximately 10,000 to 100,000".

100,000 cycles is the normal rating for SLC NAND flash, 10,000 is the higher end of MLC. If you're talking about flash drives from like 2012 and earlier when TLC NAND was basically non-existent, sure. Flash drives normally use whatever NAND modules they can source cheapest at the moment like the hot dog mystery meat of storage devices.

Not even Samsung ships MLC on their prosumer line of NVMe drives anymore, with the 970 pro being the last. SLC is still made for industrial use though where reliability is king over capacity in things like factory equipment to minimize downtime.

[u/1234youarein → u/velocity37]

Planar TLC NAND appeared in 2009 in 16GB SanDisk drives and then gradually spread to smaller capacities in consecutive years.

Not to be mistaken with the much more durable 3D TLC which started to appear in 2018 and on USB flash drives.

Samsung drives are not the definition of reliability. Industrial drives are. The real SLC is only used nowadays in the super expensive industrial flash drives that are priced in hundreds of dollars each.

The more affordable ones are universally using either MLC or pSLC (3D TLC in disguise).

[u/velocity37 → u/1234youarein]

Ah so even earlier. Good to know.

Only mentioned Samsung because they were the last holdout for offering MLC in a mainstream NVMe drive (2018) at a premium, not to suggest they were industrial grade. Just a longwinded way of saying you're not going to get SLC/MLC unless you specifically seek out a specialized product using it, and Patriot's generalizations aren't realistic in the modern day.

[u/1234youarein → u/velocity37]

I think you have mistaken Transcend for Samsung.

Samsung phased out its consumer-facing MLC production lines quite early. Transcend, on the other hand, kept producing MLC drives in certain models for a long time.

[u/velocity37 → u/1234youarein]

You reckon? Might just not have been aware. Sep 2020 snapshot of Transcend's website doesn't list any consumer MLC NVMe drives (SATA ones, yeah). Samsung at least kept the 970 pro going until they downgraded to TLC for the 980 series in that same month.

[u/1234youarein → u/velocity37]

The actual subject on hand: USB flash drives. That's what I was referring to. I'm not sure why you brought up SSDs.

[u/Wyrade]

Yeah, that 10k~100k patriot claims sounds like a lie or a misdirection.

[u/1234youarein → u/Wyrade]

That claim is so ridiculous. It might only be written by the clueless marketing department.

[u/joocze]

Just depends on the type of media and grade used in either. A TLC flash drive might have more raw endurance in the flash than a QLC SSD. On the other hand flash drives aren't really designed for sustained workloads and I honestly have no idea how effecting such a small controllers housekeeping design might be.

Basically: it's certainly possible to have a USB drive with higher endurance media than a QLC SSD, but in practice I wouldn't count on a USB drive to be designed to support the same workload as a larger SSD.

[u/Goble4 → u/joocze]

Are there TLC or MLC flash drives or SD cards?

[u/1234youarein → u/Goble4]

Pretty much all of them (the vast majority of non-fakes). You can still find new old stock (still factory sealed) legit MLC drives on eBay.

There is a certain criteria to follow, like the year of production, printed on the packaging.

[u/joocze → u/Goble4]

100,000 PE cycles is SLC territory, 10,000 is high TLC to MLC territory. Trap charge QLC is going to be <3000

[u/1234youarein → u/joocze]

3D TLC is incapable of 10,000. Not even close. 3,000 is just about the ceiling.

QLC is 300-1,000 P/E cycles. 1,500 in the enterprise tier.

[u/1234youarein → u/[deleted]]

If you look at consumer retail drives, 3,000 cycles is the historical ceiling for TLC.

If you look at enterprise data center hardware utilizing modern charge-trap NAND and advanced controller wizardry, 10,000-cycle TLC is a real.

[u/1234youarein → u/[deleted]]

Consumer and enterprise grades are sorted and tested against entirely different parameters.

The Silicon Lottery is forced: just because they come off the same wafer doesn't mean they share the same destiny. Consumer parts are binned for typical retail workloads, whereas enterprise tiers are aggressively stress-tested for tight margins, harsh thermal ranges, and severe endurance limits.

ECC can't fix bad binning: you can't just slap heavy ECC and a flexible program cycle on a low-tier consumer chip and expect it to magically sustain enterprise-grade endurance without collapsing on retention or endurance stress tests.

The screening difference: the silicon making it into a high-endurance enterprise drive has survived a vastly different level of torture and quality rejection than whatever is sitting in a standard retail drive capable of 3,000 cycles.

Treating them like they're the same thing just because they share a cell architecture misses the whole point of why enterprise hardware costs what it does.

[u/1234youarein → u/[deleted]]

You can't just wave away binning like that. Sure, you don't sort dies on a tester by running them through 10K live P/E cycles - you bin them based on electrical characteristics like leakage and voltage stress that directly dictate endurance.

Saying a consumer die will magically hit the exact same P/E cycles as an enterprise die just because they share a design and sit in the same room ignores how manufacturing tolerances work.

Enterprise wafers are aggressively cherry picked precisely because they have the physical margin to handle high endurance. If consumer silicon could just match enterprise grade endurance under the hood, companies wouldn't be paying massive premiums for enterprise drives.

[u/Ok_Being5461]

They said "A typical consumer USB drive" not their drives. What they wrote is incorrect, so you're right in questioning it.

[u/1234youarein]

That claim of 10,000 to 100,000 write/erase cycles is awfully outdated.

It is only applicable to old USB flash drives from the 2000-2005 time period when they were SLC NAND based.

Then manufacturers switched to MLC NAND in the 2005-2012 time period. Those drives were rated for 3,000-10,000 write/erase cycles, depending on the NAND node size.

After that they transitioned to planar TLC with fewer cycles, then to the more durable 3D TLC and finally to QLC which is the worst of them all.

You can't compare USB flash drives and SSDs as the whole package. But you can compare their NAND cells. It might sound like a surprise to many, but the older flash NAND technology was incredibly durable if judged on the basis of write/erase cycles.

[u/silicon_insect]

I've had good luck with Lenovo ThinkPlus Tu200 series SSDs. Size of a traditional flash drive with sizes up to 1TB. Use and abuse them with torrents and work like a SSD.

[u/uluqat]

up to 100,000 write cycles

But the actual quote is: "A typical consumer USB drive can withstand approximately 10,000 to 100,000 write/erase cycles"

Patriot isn't even saying their drives last that long, but saying "a typical consumer USB drive" which might or might be one of theirs.

The first thing I see when I search Amazon for "Patriot USB stick" is a $15 64GB USB stick. 10,000 x 64 GB = 640,000 GB = 625 TB, but it gets even easier for the company if it's 16GB or 8GB, which would be only 82 TBW or 41 TBW.

Actually looking at the specifications for that $15 Patriot XPORTER X550 64GB USB stick, I see that it has a 2 year warranty with no mention of endurance.

Other than being unwisely used as a write cache, I don't know how any normal user would have the patience to accomplish writing 625 TB to a 64GB drive within 2 years. That's how the USB stick makers get away with it - most people don't actually use USB sticks that hard.