SSD Selection

Tan Arman
Benefits of SSD
1. Peak performance for random data applications
HPE SSDs are suited to enterprise environments with
highly random data under a variety of write-workload
applications. SSDs provide significantly better random
read and write I/O operations per second (IOPS)
compared to HDDs. While sequential read and write
throughput is also improved over HDDs, the greatest
benefit is recognized in random data applications. As
a result, these high-performance, low-latency, and
low-power SSDs provide significant system benefits
for applications that previously over-provisioned HDD
capacity to achieve better performance.
2. Enterprise features for data center applications
Drive writes per day (DWPD)
• Drive writes per day (DWPD) is an endurance rating that
manufacturers of NAND flash storage provide their customers. Unlike
hard disk storage, solid state storage has a limited number of
write/erase cycles before the oxide layer within the storage device's
floating-gate transistors begins to break down, a process known as
flash wear-out. The DWPD rating tells the customer how many times
he can expect to overwrite the entire capacity of the solid state drive
before it becomes unreliable.
• DWPD will vary, depending upon whether the storage is intended for
consumer or enterprise use. Consumer use solid state drives (SSDs)
have a fixed endurance rating and capacity. Enterprise SSD
manufacturers, on the other hand, may offer SSDs of varying
endurance levels and capacities depending upon whether the
workload will be read-intensive, write-intensive or mixed.
• For instance, a vendor might sell an enterprise SSD with a high-
capacity option intended for read-intensive application workloads.
Such a high-capacity enterprise SSD might offer an endurance of only
one full DWPD, meaning the drive can write and rewrite data to full
capacity once a day for the warrantied lifespan of the drive. Another
enterprise SSD option from the same product family might support 25
DWPD at a lower capacity for use with write-intensive workloads.
 Terabytes Written (TBW)
• A couple of specifications for SSD endurance are in common use today: Terabytes Written (TBW) and
Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD). Both are different ways to express the same thing. It seems that one
vendor will specify endurance using TBW, while another will specify DWPD. How do you compare the
two?
• First, some definitions. “Terabytes Written” is the total amount of data that can be written into an
SSD before it is likely to fail. “Drive Writes Per Day” tells how many times you can overwrite the
entire capacity of the SSD every single day of its usable life without failure during the warranty period.
Since both of these are guaranteed specifications, then your drive is most likely to last a lot longer
than the number given by the SSD’s maker.
• Why are there two different specifications? The TBW specification doesn’t really specify how long the
drive will last in years. An SSD with a TBW specification will fail either when it has exceeded its TBW
goal or after its warranty period ends, whichever comes first. The DWPD specification intertwines the
number of writes with the warranty period in a way that should cause both to occur at the same time.
All in all, it’s just a matter of preference. There is no one standard way that endurance is specified.
• Before going to all this trouble, though, I would suggest for you to review the SMART attributes on an
SSD that has been used in this application or a similar one for a number of months. You are likely to
find that that wear is so much smaller than the drive’s specification that you will never come close to
exceeding the TBW or DWPD specifications. If that’s the case you need not worry much about the
SSD you select for this application. On the other hand, if you are close to either limit then you would
do well to choose an SSD that can handle your write requirements with room to spare.
Comparing DWPD to TBW
• To convert between the two you must know the disk’s
capacity and the warranty period. If drive maker gives
you TBW but you want to know DWPD you would
approach it this way:

TBW = DWPD * Warranty * 365 * Capacity/1,024

The constants are simply to convert years to days (365) and gigabytes to terabytes
(1,024). Some might argue that this number should be 1,000, and that may be
correct, but the difference between the two is only 2.4%, and The SSD Guy highly
doubts that you are planning resources so tightly that this will matter.

• If you want to go the other way, and convert TBW to

DWPD, you would use this formula:

DWPD = TBW * 1024/(Capacity * Warranty * 365)

 How to Compute Drive Writes Per Day
(DWPD)
• Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) calculations allow us to use the TBW
specification of a drive to calculate the number of times the user capacity
of a drive can be written per day over the warranty period (or a different
number of years), based again upon the JEDEC workload used to specify
the TBW [1]

• For a 1.8TB DC400 SSD with a 5-year limited warranty, the calculation
would be
Drive Writes Per Day = 1432TB * 1000
365 Days * 5 * 1800GB
= 0.43 or 43% of the drive capacity per day (that’s 774GB)
References:
1. JESD219: Solid-State Drive (SSD) Endurance Workloads, JEDEC Committee (http://www.jedec.org/standards-documents/docs/jesd219a).
These Client and Enterprise workloads represent a standard for the industry to rate their SSDs and derive the rated TBW supported by
their SSDs. Note that your workload could vary and the rated TBW specifications may be above or below your workload’s over time, due
to the unique WAF from your application.
Write-Intensive vs Read-Intensive
• Drive manufacturers sometimes offer SSDs of varying
endurance levels and capacities earmarked for read-
intensive, write-intensive or mixed workloads. For example,
a read-intensive SSD might guarantee only one to three
drive writes per day (DWPD) but offer higher capacity than
a write-intensive SSD that supports up to 25 DWPD. The
write-intensive SSD’s usable capacity may be lower because
a greater percentage of NAND flash is reserved to handle
garbage collection and compensate for potential chip wear-
out or failure.
• Read-intensive SSDs tend to use the least expensive types
of NAND flash memory, such as multilevel cell (MLC) and
triple-level cell (TLC) flash. Write-intensive SSDs more
commonly use enterprise MLC (eMLC) or single-level cell
(SLC) flash, which offer higher endurance than MLC and
TLC. Storage systems that use less expensive MLC for write-
intensive workloads generally employ special algorithms
and other techniques to manage endurance.