| There are certainly workloads that will wear out a SSD, random database writes being the most common. But that is only a very small portion of the storage ecosystem, not to mention that there are plenty of ways to retool SQL backends to not do random writes any more, particularly since it doesn't gain you anything on a modern copy-on-write style filesystem verses indexing the new record yourself as an append. So I expect this particular issue will take care of itself in the future. It's a matter of not blindly using someones database backend and expecting it to be nice. The vast majority of information stored these days is write-once-read-never, followed by write-once-read-occasionally. I expected our developer box which is chock full of uncompressed crash dumps and many, many copies of the source tree in various states to have more wear on it than it did, but after thinking about it a bit I realized that most of that data was write-once-read-hardly-at-all. In terms of hardware life, for servers there are only a few things which might cut short a computer's life, otherwise it would easily last 50 years. (1) Electrolytic capacitors. (2) Any spinning media or low frequency transformers. (3) On-mobo flash or e2 that cannot be updated. (1) Electrolytic capacitors have largely disappeared from motherboards in favor of solid caps which, if not over-volted, should last 30 years. Electrolytic caps are not sealed well and evaporate over time, as well as slowly burn holes in the insulator. They generally go bad 10-30 years later depending on how much you undervolt them (the more you undervolt, the longer they last). Even so I still have boards with 30+ year old electrolytics in them that work. (2) Spinning media obviously has a limited life. That's what we are getting rid of now :-). Low frequency transformers have mostly gone away. Transformers in general... anything with windings that is, have a limited life due to the wire insulation breaking down over time but most modern use cases in a computer (if there are any at all) likely have huge errors of margin. (3) Firmware stored in E2 and flash, or OTP eprom, rather than fuse-based proms, will become corrupt over time. 10 years is a minimum life, 20-30 years is more common. It depends on a number of factors. Other than that there isn't much left that can go bad. All motherboards these days have micro coatings which effectively seal even the chip leads, so corrosion isn't as big a factor as it was 20 years ago. The actual chip logic basically will not fail and since the high-speed clocks on the whole mobo can be controlled, so aging effects which degrade junction performance for most of the chip can be mitigated. I suppose an ethernet port might go bad if it gets hit by lightning but I've never had a mobo ethernet go bad in my life. Switch ethernet ports going bad is usually just due to poor parts selection or overvolting which would not be present in a colocation facility or machine room. In anycase, there is no reason under the sun that a modern computer with a SSD wouldn't last 30 years with only fan, real-time clock battery, and PSU replacements. -Matt |
1. That waxy thermal pad material certainly dries out and becomes ineffective in less than 10 years.
2. Power supplies still have large electrolytic capacitors right next to heatsinks
3. BGA parts with lead-free solder are still going to have a limited amount of thermal cycles they can withstand before the solder balls become brittle.
4. I notice an increasing use of conductive glue to attach flat flex cables in computer parts, especially ultrabooks, and this also has a limited number of thermal cycles before it starts to degrade. (Anyone who bought a Samsung TV between 2005 and 2008 might already be aware of this.) This is probably the worst issue since it isn't going to be fixable for a hobbyist.
Also, I wouldn't even guarantee that firmware in Flash that isn't rewritten often will last 10 years. There are a lot of dead Nintendo Wiis already due to bad blocks in the flash.
I currently own a 30 year old PC-XT and a 40 year old stereo receiver, but they didn't make it to that age without maintenance and replaced components. I'm afraid that in 30 years many of today's devices will have failed in ways that are impossible to get at or repair.