Smart Buyer
  • Categories
    • Buying Guides
    • Components
    • DIY and How-to
    • Industry Trends
    • NetSec
    • Networking
    • Storage
    • Systems – PC & Laptop
    • Windows
  • About
  • Why NeweggBusiness?
  • Contact Us
Top Posts
5 Ways to Stream from PC to TV...
PC Cooling: How to Set up Computer Case...
2019 How-to Guide: Small Office Network Setup
2019 Solid State Drive (SSD) Buying Guide
How to Choose the Correct RAM Upgrade
Four Apps that Make Your Tablet a Second...
How to Troubleshoot a PC Power Supply
Wireless Router Running Hot? Cool It Down the...
Computer Monitor Buying Guide 2019
Born in the USA: Computer Hardware Made in...

Smart Buyer

  • Categories
    • Buying Guides
    • Components
    • DIY and How-to
    • Industry Trends
    • NetSec
    • Networking
    • Storage
    • Systems – PC & Laptop
    • Windows
  • About
  • Why NeweggBusiness?
  • Contact Us
Awesome IT Office Humor

What NASA’s Mars Rover Tells Us About SSD Life

by Adam Lovinus February 13, 2019
by Adam Lovinus February 13, 2019 8 comments 2330 views

The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has likely died. NASA has exhausted its efforts trying to make contact with the rover, and will wrap its 14-year mission that lasted longer than anyone at Jet Propulsion Laboratory ever expected.

A dead battery is the likely culprit. NASA believes Opportunity’s solar panels became caked with dust, preventing recharge. This comes four years after NASA was able to salvage the rover from a near-death experience related to its flash memory solid-state drive.

Solid-State Storage Drives on Opportunity

Then in 2015, NASA called it “amnesia”— Opportunity was having problems with its onboard data storage drive, resulting in nightly loss of data after its system powers down. This came in year ten of the originally planned three month mission, and experts recognized the glitch as an effect of old age.

After ten years of exploring Mars’ Meridiani Planum region in sub-freezing temperatures, Opportunity’s hardware seemed to have deteriorated.

NASA Project Manager John Callas suspected the failure wasn’t due to the harsh Martian environment, however.

“Flash memory has a limitation on how many times you can read and write to it,” Callas told Discovery News, indicating that the daily writing and re-writing of expansive sets of data to Opportunity’s memory banks are the real toll-takers.

NASA engineers drove the rover during daylight hours, gathering telemetry data about Mars’ surface. To conserve energy at night, the rover powered down, storing the day’s data in the non-volatile flash memory banks. Unlike volatile memory like RAM, this type of solid state memory does not require constant power to store data.

The Opportunity has seven onboard flash memory banks. Engineers at JPL pinpointed that one of the banks was defective. As a result, when Opportunity tried and failed to copy data to the broken memory bank, its software forces a reboot and loses the data. What’s worse, commands from mission control tripped the system into a cycle of continuous reboots, essentially shutting down the mission for hours at a time.

JPL deployed software that programs that enabled Opportunity to ignore the defective bank. It prompted the rover to write to one of six banks still functioning.  Initially NASA hoped it was enough to keep Opportunity driving for a little longer.

To everyone’s surprise, Opportunity lasted another four years.

Lifespan of commercial solid-state memory

When comparing SSD vs HDD in computer systems, durability is a huge selling point for solid-state storage. SSDs use an integrated circuit assembly which is more resilient compared to the spinning platters in mechanical disk storage. But flash isn’t perfect. Like any drive, SSDs have a life expectancy.

We think of SSD lifespan in program and erase (P/E) cycles. Mainstream solid-state drives we use in computers generally wear out after being programmed and erased 10,000 times. Manufacturers calculate their warranty offering using a measure called ‘Total Bytes Written (TBW) or a length five-years, whichever comes first.

For example, the Samsung 860 EVO warranty shapes out like this:

  • 250 GB drive is rated 150 TBW
  • 500 GB drive is rated 300 TBW
  • 1 TB drive is rated 600 TBW
  • 2 TB drive is rated 1,200 TBW
  • 4 TB drive is rated 2,400 TBW

If you do the math, you would need to write and erase 320 GB per day to exceed TBW ratings before the warranty period. As ridiculous as it seems, SSD research and development aims at extending lifespan further.

Several years ago, engineers at the Taiwanese semiconductor company Macronix created self-healing flash memory that they claim can survive more than 100 million program/erase cycles. That is likely to outlast human civilization. This experimental design charges circuits with bursts of extreme heat (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit) which reverses the oxidation that wears out flash transistors with each cycle.

Why larger SSD drives are generally more durable

There are lengthy performance testing reports to browse on the Web, where SSDs are put through rigorous paces of continuous writing and erasing. In many reports, like this one from an independent German SSD tester, larger drives (500 GB) kept under a 10 percent failure rate for right around 10 years—an interesting congruence with what we saw with the NASA rover.

Smaller drives did not fare as well. The smallest drive tested (32 GB) reached a 10 percent failure rate after just 1.5 years.

With this in mind, it is remarkable that Opportunity’s memory banks held out as long as they did. “The rover has been amazingly healthy considering how much we’ve used it,” Callas said. He likened the rover to an aging parent, who may be in good health, but “could have a massive stroke right in the middle of the night—so we’re always cautious something could happen.”

Related Smart Buyer articles

  • 2019 SSD Buying Guide
  • How to Install an SSD into an old laptop
  • HDD or SSD? How to Buy Disk Storage in 2019
  • Best Selling SSDs for Business Systems (2018)

This article was originally published Jan. 8 2015, and updated Feb. 13, 2019. 

Adam Lovinus

Adam Lovinus

A tech writer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast from Orange County, California.

More Posts - Website - Twitter - LinkedIn - Google Plus

Summary
A Good Run: What NASA’s Mars Rover Tells Us About SSD Life
Article Name
A Good Run: What NASA’s Mars Rover Tells Us About SSD Life
Description
The NASA Mars rover has a faulty flash memory bank, and provides a good illustration of what commercial flash memory users can expect for SSD life span.
Author
Adam Lovinus
Mars RoverOpportunitySSDs
8 comments
0
FacebookTwitterGoogle +PinterestEmail
Adam Lovinus
Adam Lovinus

A tech writer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast from Orange County, California.

previous post
5 Questions to Ask Before You Buy IT Equipment
next post
Presidents’ Day: Early Technology Adopters in the White House

Related Posts

Presidents’ Day: Early Technology Adopters in the White...

February 14, 2019

IT Horrors Straight Out of Friday the 13th

October 25, 2018

Use an IPv6 Router to Light a Christmas...

December 15, 2016

Paradigm: Jacob Janerka’s Weird World of PC Nostalgia

October 27, 2016

WiseNotes: a Simple, Open-Source Technical Documentation Tool

August 22, 2016

These ’80s Office Tech PSA Posters Are Awesome

August 1, 2016

The Seven Types of Windows 10 Holdouts

June 9, 2016

How to Always Find the Best Tech Deals...

May 26, 2016

Minecraft Education Edition vs. the Best Computer Lab...

April 15, 2016

7 Simple Life Hacks to Use at the...

December 16, 2015

8 comments

Avatar
Doug Weathers January 8, 2015 - 2:54 pm

The picture at the top of the article looks more like the Curiosity rover than it looks like the Opportunity rover. Opportunity is solar-powered and has large solar panels on its upper deck. Curiosity is nuclear-powered and has no solar panels.

Here’s a picture of the last three Mars rover types we’ve landed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover#mediaviewer/File:Mars_Science_Laboratory_mockup_comparison.jpg

Opportunity is the medium-sized one on the left, Curiosity is the big one on the right.

Reply
7 Tips to Maximize SSD Endurance - HardBoiled October 13, 2015 - 9:53 am

[…] Related: What NASA’s Mars Rover Tells Us About SSD Life […]

Reply
Avatar
Aaron H. February 15, 2019 - 10:42 am

“Initially NASA hoped will enough to keep Opportunity driving for a little longer.”
I think there’s a typo in there. 🙂

Reply
Adam Lovinus
Adam Lovinus February 15, 2019 - 11:05 am

Fixed!

Reply
Avatar
Logan Harbaugh February 15, 2019 - 3:49 pm

Actually, the lifespan math is the same on all the SSDs – 1.66 times capacity. Since the overall lifespan of the drive is related to the number of cells times the theoretical number of writes per cell, a larger drive will have more total bytes written in its lifespan, assuming that the size of blocks on each drive is the same.

Reply
Avatar
Rick Russell February 16, 2019 - 7:01 am

TBW is “TeraBytes Written”, not bytes.

Reply
Avatar
Jon February 16, 2019 - 8:44 pm

NASA needs to put some intel optain in the next rover lol

Reply
Avatar
Jeff Pritchard February 16, 2019 - 8:47 pm

The flash deployed on the Opportunity rover is drastically different than today’s SSDs. It was built in 2002. Todays 3D flash (MLC, TLC) has much less endurance than the SLC from just a few years ago

Reply

What's your take? Cancel reply

Subscribe

  • 1

    5 Ways to Stream from PC to TV or Digital Display

    May 23, 2016
  • 2

    PC Cooling: How to Set up Computer Case Fans

    September 25, 2015
  • 3

    2019 How-to Guide: Small Office Network Setup

    December 20, 2018
  • 4

    2019 Solid State Drive (SSD) Buying Guide

    December 6, 2018
  • 5

    How to Choose the Correct RAM Upgrade

    April 28, 2015
  • 6

    Four Apps that Make Your Tablet a Second Monitor

    January 9, 2018
  • 7

    How to Troubleshoot a PC Power Supply

    July 11, 2018
  • 8

    Wireless Router Running Hot? Cool It Down the Easy Way

    December 9, 2016
  • 9

    Computer Monitor Buying Guide 2019

    January 4, 2019
  • 10

    Born in the USA: Computer Hardware Made in America

    September 27, 2018

Newegg + Business

How is this different from Newegg.com?

Why NeweggBusiness?
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin
  • Youtube
  • Email
  • RSS