Micron: Hot DRAM, we're still shifting piles of kit, but somebody's missing our XPoint Micron rode strong demand for DRAM and flash to record revenues and profits for its third fiscal 2018 quarter (PDF), but XPoint chip sales to Intel collapsed. Revenues were $7.8bn, up 40 per cent annually, with net profits of $3.8bn, more than twice last year's $1.7bn. Memory ruled the quarter with DRAM providing 71 per cent …
MLC and TLC are crap already.. QLC will be the worst really... .. SSD NAND has to disappear quickly. Completely unreliable. Anything other than SLC NAND SSD drives is just unusable and can't be trusted.
MLC, TLC and now QLC just fail quickly, they are cheap as hell to make it really is manufacturers selling defective products to increase profit.
Unfortunately is a chicken & egg issue with 3D XPoint BUT that is the only technology for SSD reliable enough to forget HDUs. Intel and Micron should start manufacturing 3D XPoint in large quantities and sell it at half the cheapest NAND prices to boost sales and kill the NAND market. THAT is the only strategy to change things. 3D XPoint must succeed and replace all the NAND crap and then HDUs too. For that to happen Intel and Micron must start selling some millions of units at a loss then when people would be in a rush buying 3D XPoint at cheaper prices than NAND units obviously Intel and Micron would get huge profits on very large quantities .. the NAND market would be taken by storm by that strategy. That is the only strategy for Intel and Micron to follow. Anything else would fail.
I assume you have a pretty extreme use case. The oldest SSDs(HPE 3PAR) at the organization I am at are Feb 2014. Their stats claim they have 95% of their life left. zero failures. Roughly 1000 VMs run on top of that array.
In general enterprise SSDs are so reliable these days that many vendors are offering 3-5 year(or perhaps more) unconditional warranties(MLC with any access pattern) on them. Back in ~2012 time frame HP came out and said that there was less than 5% of all deployed SSDs (on 3PAR anyway) had failed.
On the consumer side things are a bit murkier, with many brands and models seemingly being quite crappy. I steered clear of consumer SSD until the Samsung 850 Pro came out, have deployed Samsung 8xx and 9xx Pro/EVO across my own personal lineup of stuff(my main laptop has 1 850 pro and two 860 pros), with no issues.
I have one Intel SSD (the one with the Skull on it), didn't have anywhere else to put it so I tossed it into my PS4, runs fine though can't say I see any significant speed bump at least with the games I was playing at the time GTA 5 and Fallout 4 (about the only games I have played on PS4). (revised comment to reflect right year)
So my somewhat limited experience the past ~4-5 years says SSDs(all are MLC) are quite reliable, but there are certainly crappy ones out there like anything else.
SSDs aren't cheap though of course, last I saw(here on el reg) the raw cost/TB was still around 10X more than 7200 RPM(industry average numbers).
Most of the failures we've seen were due to poor SSD firmware and OS support, not the Flash itself.
When a few customers first put SSDs in (against advice), they'd die in about six months because OS support was terrible and SSD firmware poor.
Later, OS support became good and failures instead clustered with particular brands and sizes.
Firmware updates fixed that.
These days, they last very well.
The downside is that they die without warning - sure, the health data makes some claims but most failures don't seem to trip the warnings.
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