@openoms @waxwing What brands/sizes have actually failed for you? Have you tried over provisioning?

@openoms @waxwing "Single Level Cell (SLC) are basicly the common SSD-s which are more reliable and fast, but need more power and also more expensive than a USB flash drive."

This is out of date btw. Almost all SSDs on the market right now are multiple level cells.

@openoms @waxwing "Rewrite cycles are respectively around:
80-100k for SLC
8-10k for MLC
3-5k for TLC (not suitable for constant rewrites even for months)"

Also the stats for rewrite cycles are much higher than they actually are. These days modern SSD cells have a rated lifetime of just a few hundred rewrites, not thousands. You see this in total endurance specs, which are typically just a few hundred times the drive capacity.

@pete @waxwing
SSDs really?
Wouldn't be surprised if that would be the specs of cheap SD cards.

@openoms @waxwing Yup: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16433/samsung-introduces-870-evo-sata-ssds

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3230382/wd-blue-3d-ssd-review.html

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/silicon-power-p34a80-pcie-gen3x4-m-2-nvme-ssd,6180.html

Those are the first three results on Amazon for "1TB SSD", and they're all TLC flash. Bigger drives are moving to QLD flash, four bits per cell.

SLC-only drives are a very niche product these days. Though it is very common for drives to contain some SLC as a write buffer. That's why drive write speeds often drop after sustained writes - the SLC buffer filled up.

@openoms @waxwing More expensive drives use capacitor backed DRAM for this. If power is removed the drive quickly writes the DRAM contents to flash with the energy in the capacitors.

@openoms @waxwing Many drives can actually dynamically switch between SLC and multiple-bits-per-cell, so as much as 100% of the drive will be used in SLC mode until you fill it up. (By "fill it up", I'm talking about the space that has not been marked as unused with trim)

@pete Thanks for expalanation, that quoted article is indeed outdated, SSDs are not all SLC any more.
Can we say though that the endurance of an SDcard is nowhere close to even a TLC setup of an SSD with SLC or DRAM buffers?
It is just difficult for me to accept that running an operating system and data storage for an intended high use and uptime server can be realisticly based on the cheapest flash storage available.

@pete Agree about redundancy for higher value applications. I am in the process of moving all my self-hosted stuff to a server with a 6 disk ZFS RAID-Z2 and ECC RAM.

@pete @waxwing
quick check in the drawer results this. I had multiple of the endurance cards fail after 1-1.5 year of heavy usage as well.
They are either painfully slow to write or read only.

@pete @waxwing
Social media, pictures, videos etc might be ok, but anyone trusting an irrevocable and frequently written lightning channel database on an SDcard is taking far more risk than I'd would tolerate.

@openoms @waxwing I mean, anyone trusting a non-raid setup for Lightning is taking a fair bit of risk...

Though the failure modes of becoming read only or slow to write are pretty benign. Early SSDs were often bricked - good to see that's fixed.

@openoms @waxwing What % of the SD card was actually being used in those applications?

@pete Max about half of it.