Comment by RA2lover
2 years ago
Could this be used to extend the lifetime of an already worn-out SSD? I wonder if there's some business in china taking those and reflashing them as "new".
2 years ago
Could this be used to extend the lifetime of an already worn-out SSD? I wonder if there's some business in china taking those and reflashing them as "new".
The only rejuvenation process that I know is heat, either long period exposure to 250°C or short-term at higher temperature (800°C).
https://m.hexus.net/tech/news/storage/48893-making-flash-mem...
https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DH4waJBeENVQ&sa=U&ved=2ahUK...
That first article was 12 years ago when MLC was the norm and had 10k endurance.
Macronix have known about the benefits of heating for a long time but previously used to bake NAND chips in an oven at around 250C for a few hours to anneal them – that’s an expensive and inconvenient thing to do for electronic components!
I wonder if the e-waste recycling operations in China may be doing that to "refurbish" worn out NAND flash and resell it. They already do harvesting of ICs so it doesn't seem impossible... and maybe this effect was first noticed by someone heating the chips to desolder them.
So the trick is to somehow redirect all of the heat energy coming from cpus onto the storage, in bursts? :D
Stay closer, now they're putting heatsinks on controller chips of SSDs :D
Maybe 6-8 years ago, Samsung (?) used to advise foregoing a heatsink on their nvme sticks for optimal results.
Technically, QLC NAND that is no longer able to distinguish at QLC levels should certainly still be suitable as MLC for a while longer, and SLC, for all practical intents and purposes, forever.
Yes, but certainly no consumer or even enterprise ssd firmware has bothered to integrate that functionality.