Flash storage endurance

Posted Jun 8, 2018 18:20 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Flash storage endurance by excors
Parent article: Flash storage topics

> But if you want to know how that affects the lifetime of a phone, you need to know the behaviour of the software on that phone,

Basic benchmark design problem, not specific to storage or endurance.

> and you need to know what memory chip it uses

Not a problem specific to storage or endurance: https://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+intel+modem

> CPU/GPU benchmarks are much easier since the relevant software is provided by the benchmark itself

Interfaces to GPU are orders of magnitude more complex than storage interfaces; one of the reasons cheating GPU benchmarks is universal: https://www.google.com/search?q=game+benchmark+cheating
https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/apitrace/
Yet no one suggests to stop benchmarking GPUs.

> The problem isn't necessarily that people would cheat, it's that the marketing people would tell the engineers to spend effort legitimately...

We know how "legitimately" often ends up with (at least) GPUs and car emissions. You can take for granted that some actors will always go "beyond legitimate"; again nothing specific to flash storage or endurance.

> I guess you'd need access to automatically-uploaded error logs or customer support records to see how many users have encountered storage errors. That would be nice, but seems unlikely to happen.

How do we know it's not happening already? (biggest lie on the Internet: "I agree")

Flash storage endurance

Posted Jun 8, 2018 18:44 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

>> I guess you'd need access to automatically-uploaded error logs or customer support records to see how many users have encountered storage errors. That would be nice, but seems unlikely to happen.
>
> How do we know it's not happening already? (biggest lie on the Internet: "I agree")

Error logs certainly get uploaded already, on some devices - they're very useful for identifying and prioritising common bugs, quickly detecting regressions when rolling out OTAs, etc. What I mean is unlikely is that the companies with that information would ever release it publicly.