Probably pretty good. Unfortunately they don’t support the SMART wear levelling indicator but I can get a fairly generic “sense” of how they’re doing as they are exposing a different attribute:
server ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
live db 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 092 092 000 Pre-fail Always - 286
live db 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 085 085 000 Pre-fail Always - 535
back db 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 093 093 000 Pre-fail Always - 247
back db 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 084 084 000 Pre-fail Always - 550
webonly 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 12
webonly 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 14
webonly 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 11
webonly 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 15
So the live and replica database servers have more wear on them. No surprise there. I should graph this.
There’s another excellent reason for this and that’s performance. For another customer, I was evaluating 128GB and 256GB “value” drives (i.e. not overprovisioned like the Enterprise drives) as replacements for the 50GB SSDs that reached end of life.
The overprovisioned 50GB SSDs gave you VERY consistent performance on a workload. You knew you were getting the IOPS and latency you needed:
Whereas the “Value” drives let you use all that space, but you have to manually enforce overprovisioning if you must avoid high write completion latency and maintain high IOPS:
(yes, the graphs are slightly different things but the 50GB drive maintains that red line like it was aimed by NASA)