SSD Life Expectancy

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

So, I was watching this video today.  I didn't know that SSDs have a limited number of writes...or, perhaps, I'm not understanding this right.  I do love my SSD drives for their speed.  I also use an SSD for my Windows memory cache and it has me wondering if that's the wisest decision.  What do the more knowledgeable amongst us think about the best use of SSD?

 

[HiFlyer 9,359]

Hope this helps http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

 

[Slayer 190]

Move your swapfile to a mechanical drive. it helps with reducing the writes.

[Dave_YVR 973]

I wouldn't think much of it at all, a modern SSD should still outlive a hard drive. Or in even easier terms, they should last longer than we should be holding onto them.

[martin-w 3,235]

It's not an issue. Most naturally change their drives well before such issues arise.

[Nuno Pinto 1,397]

Let's just say it'll last more than your old harddrives with regular use.

Forget about the endurance and enjoy them, you'll swap them before they die.

[Jimm 437]

If anyone uses Samsung drives, there is the Samsung Magician, which does monitor read and writes and checks the disk regularly for stability.  CrystalDisk ( http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html ) is another utility that you can run to monitor the lifespan of a given drive, and in this day in age, it's a good idea to keep an eye on it before the inevitable happens.

[vortex681 806]

Take a look at https://betanews.com/2014/12/05/modern-ssds-can-last-a-lifetime/. Even the SSDs that failed earliest in the test they quoted lasted for 728TB of writes. The best lasted more than 2PB and, apparently, many modern drives can exceed their theoretical lifespan anyway. To put this into context, looking at the "worst" drives they tested (to quote from the article):

"728 TB of data is not as much as 2 PB of data, of course, but, even so, we are still looking at a very long lifespan in this case. Using the same 10-year lifespan, one would have to write 204.23 GB of data each day to reach the aforementioned figure. That is still a lot of data."

Writing consistently more than 20GB of data to a single drive every day is unusual so the average user would expect an SSD life of comfortably more than 10 years based on these figures. 10 years is way beyond the expected lifespan of most hard drives so if you weren't worried about your hard drive failing, you certainly shouldn't worry about your SSD. That said, for peace of mind don't forget to backup regularly!

[TechguyMaxC 516]

SSDs are so cheap now, I wouldn't even care if one burned out.  

[vortex681 806]

On 30 March 2017 at 5:21 PM, TechguyMaxC said:

SSDs are so cheap now, I wouldn't even care if one burned out.  

Cheap depends on your income and what you're comparing them to! They're much more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs, especially if you go for the higher capacities. A 1TB SSD costs at least 5 times more than the equivalent HDD and, as such, constitutes a significant part of the cost of the whole system. I certainly wouldn't consider an SSD as a disposable item any more than I would have done a HDD and, considering what I paid for mine, I'd want them to be reliable for a long time.

[HiFlyer 9,359]

The early ssd's were plagued with failures and that kind of gave them a bad reputation. I remember reading review after review on Newegg from purchasers complaining of their drives suddenly dying, many times after only weeks or months of use.

I now have two of the newer Samsung 850 Evo 3D drives, and have had no issues. The fact is I was curious, and purchased them largely as an experiment to see if they would either drop dead on me, or prove as reliable as the newer reviews seemed to be indicating.

So far it's been the latter.

[Nuno Pinto 1,397]

I still have my first SSD ever (Intel X-25M, 80GB) and it still performs like on the first day (not THAT good, but much better than any HDD). It doesn't even have TRIM, and i purchased it like 8 years ago?

How about that for some lifespan? :P

[HiFlyer 9,359]

17 minutes ago, NaMcO said:

I still have my first SSD ever (Intel X-25M, 80GB) and it still performs like on the first day (not THAT good, but much better than any HDD). It doesn't even have TRIM, and i purchased it like 8 years ago?

How about that for some lifespan? :P

The intel drives were almost always the exception, and people paid a premium for that. I remember pricing them back in the day and just slowly backing away.

[Nuno Pinto 1,397]

Yeah, for 80GB it wasn't cheap at all. Over 340 eur IIRC.

[TechguyMaxC 516]

8 hours ago, vortex681 said:

Cheap depends on your income and what you're comparing them to! They're much more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs, especially if you go for the higher capacities. A 1TB SSD costs at least 5 times more than the equivalent HDD and, as such, constitutes a significant part of the cost of the whole system. I certainly wouldn't consider an SSD as a disposable item any more than I would have done a HDD and, considering what I paid for mine, I'd want them to be reliable for a long time.

Notice I said *I* wouldn't care.  Not that anyone else wouldn't.  I use HDs for long term storage and SSDs for OSes, performance-sensitive apps, and work space for video editing.  Besides, when you have a Micro Center nearby it's trivial to go pickup replacement parts.  Especially when they're this cheap: http://www.microcenter.com/product/465260/120GB_SSD_Plus