Samsung Delivers ‘I Will Survive’ Parody, Celebrating Success In The Tech Report’s SSD Endurance Experiment

It’s that jovial time of year as the festive season dawns upon us, and Samsung spreads some light-hearted joy in the form of a parody song about its success in an SSD endurance experiment. At the end of a tortuous 18 months, a single surviving SSD breathed its last digital breath, reaching a monumental 2.5 Petabytes of writes. That SSD was a Samsung 840 Pro, and its final request was a rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.

A couple of years ago, The Tech Report started an experiment to find out just how long an SSD will last under some very tortuous conditions. Simulating a very stressful workload that even a data-center would be hard-pushed to match; these SSDs were subjected to massive amounts of reads and writes, to find out just how durable NAND flash can be.

Solid-state drives make use of a type of flash memory to store information, but over time, the cells that store the data break down. Effectively, flash memory becomes unreliable beyond a certain number of write operations, leading to data corruption or an unresponsive drive. To compensate for this, SSD controllers use wear-leveling algorithms to spread the write operations evenly across the entire drive, so that a single flash cell doesn’t wear out prematurely. On top of this, SSDs typically come with over-provisioned sections as a reserve, further increasing the available pool of flash memory for the algorithm to work with.

Manufacturers will typically rate SSDs to a lifetime total of a few hundred terabytes. This far exceeds what any normal person would typically subject their drives to, as the average write amount is typically just a couple of terabytes a year. However, real-world conditions can be quite different from the lab, hence the need for testing.

The experiment concluded back in March this year, and you can read the final summary, as well as details of the experiment, from The Tech Report. While all drives tested exceeded their rated write limits, the run-away winner was the Samsung 840 Pro, at an impressive 2.5 Petabytes (2500 Terabytes) of writes. In celebration of this, article author Geoff Gasior concluded the experiment with a parody of Gloria Gaynor’s iconic I Will Survive.

Samsung, expectedly chuffed to bits at its success, took it upon itself to celebrate by making a music video (embedded above), inspired by the lyrics in the review. While there is definitely a playful cheesiness to the video, it’s worth watching for a quick giggle. The video, performed by Anders Graham, one of Samsung’s SSD marketing team, is being rolled out as some light-hearted entertainment to coincide with Samsung’s campaign to raise awareness about the benefits of SSDs.

Hats off to Samsung for making the video happen, and The Tech Report for the testing and lyrics.