Reply to post: S.M.A.R.T. provides this data, you had to know they'd use it

S.M.A.R.T. provides this data, you had to know they'd use it

While they could theoretically refuse warranty service by looking at the data volumes, I highly doubt they are doing that. At least, not yet...drive makers are hurting though so getting more stringent on warranty replacement is probably a strategy they are considering. Anyway, the recommended DWPD figures might help dissuade use of a consumer drive in a corporate server where previously if you didn't need 15K level of performance you could save a bit of money buying the cheaper variety if you figured RAID would protect you from data loss.

The high performance 'enterprise' drive is already pretty much dead, and the general purpose 'consumer' drive has only a year or two left. Remember, they don't need to equip PCs with 4 TB drives, a once a 1 TB SSD reaches price parity with a 1 TB HDD which I'd guess happens around 2020, all PCs will ship with a SSD and you will add a HDD at extra cost if you need the additional storage.

The next to fall will be the video drive, in a few years when SSDs come close enough to price parity with HDDs. Endurance-wise, my back of the envelope calculations indicate using a 1 TB Samsung drive in a DVR recording six HD tuners 24x7 would last about two years before it hits its rated write limit. So endurance needs to be improved, but not THAT much. Double that endurance and you should be fine - after all Storage Review's tests indicate that many SSDs last several times longer than the rated life, and large block writes as in a DVR are the optimal case. A four year rated life that is going to be 6-12 years in reality should be fine especially since S.M.A.R.T is able to tell you when it is running out of relocatable blocks.

Once video drives fall, only "capacity" drives that use SMR will remain. They will be used for 'cold' storage that has few writes so neither the lifetime nor crappy write latency will matter.