MTBF is defined as the predicted elapsed time between inherent failures of a system during operation.
Literalmente significa "tempo médio entre falhas". Além disso ...
As you can see, MTBF refers to the failure rate of a drive over its expected lifetime. This doesn't mean a 1.2 million hour MTBF drive will last 1.2 million hours, and a 1.5 million hour MTBF drive will last 1.5 million hours (that’s 136 to 171 years by the way)
Então, o que o SSD MTBF realmente significa para mim?
unfortunately, most manufacturers don’t share this information freely.
O que o MTBF de 2.000.000 horas significa para mim?
Na tentativa de tornar o exemplo usado no artigo específico para uma unidade com um MTBF de 2.000.000 horas. A seguinte matemática foi realizada para determinar que uma falha ocorreria a cada 250 dias
2,000,000 / 8 hours a day = 250,000 / 1000 drives = 250 days.
O artigo originalmente dizia que uma unidade com um MTBF de 1,5 milhão de horas falharia uma vez a cada 150 dias:
if the drive is used at an average of 8 hours a day, a population of 1000 SSDs would be expected to have one failure every 150 days ...
O artigo continua a indicar que o MTBF não é uma ótima maneira de determinar a confiabilidade do drive.
A better way to get an idea of how long an SSD will actually last for you would be to consider the Total Bytes Written spec, or TBW. Although this is another ‘overall expectation’ figure and doesn’t directly tell you the lifespan of a drive, it will give you an idea of how one drive compares to another. Unfortunately, not all manufacturers give out this spec either.
O artigo também continua a explicar como o MTBF é normalmente determinado.
The JEDEC JESD218A standard defines the method for testing the read/write endurance of an SSD (free registration required to view) which is the leading cause of SSD failure, but manufacturers may choose to supplement this with some additional failure tests.
Another thing to consider is what workload is used to specify the MTBF. For instance, Intel qualifies their SSDs using a workload of 20 GB of writes per day for 5 years. With this workload, along with the supplemental failure tests, the Intel 335 has an MTBF of 1.2 million hours. However if the workload was reduced to 10 GB a day, the MTBF would be 2.5 million hours. At 5 GB per day, it becomes 4 million hours.
Referências
- Entendendo o MTBF no SSD - O que o MTBF de um SSD significa para você? - Hardcoreware.com, Carl Nelson, 6 de janeiro de 2013