As some may have noticed, I just replaced my dying HDD with an SSD. I remember being sceptical of SSDs due to many reports of their low life-expectancy and also read a lot of advice that one should not keep important data on them for this reason. I bought an SSD of the same size as my previous HDD to make sure that I can continue to work in the same manner as before (albeit obviously more efficiently). However, considering the allegedly low life expectancy I'm inclined to avoid using it for certain things (like video capture which can quickly write several or even dozens of gigabytes of data - ironically video editing is also a matter where the extra speed would actually come in VERY handy).

The thing is that 1. not a single person I know who has bought an SSD has had one die on them yet (and it's been quite a few years since they first got them) and 2. my SSD comes with a five year warranty so presumably the drive is expected to last at least this long. Five years is incidentally the time after which an older HDD of mine suffered a head crash and also the time after which my last HDD started seriously acting up so the life expectancy appears very much samey.

So I wonder: were people exaggerating with the low life expectancy of SSDs when they first became a thing? Have SSDs improved in this regard since then? Or have people simply not properly put the life expectancy of SSDs into context and just missed the fact that it's actually similar (or maybe even superior?) to traditional HDDs?

Would be glad for some input on this matter. And please, no lectures on doing backups. I have been regularly backing up my most important files in the past and will continue to do so.

All I know on this matter is what a tech geek friend of mine told me: that the life expectancy of SSDs is "more reliable" than of HDDs and one can quite accurately predict after how many writing operations they will die and that they will always do so suddenly without any earlier indications of something being wrong.

Yes, it was a lie. People who couldn't do math vastly miscalculated the longevity of the drives. Remember all the tricks and gimmicks people would use to avoid writing to the SSD, so as not to wear it out? Yeah, that was all bollocks. Early testers showed that you could write 100GB of data daily for over 20 years before hitting the theoretical wall.

And, yes, they have improved steadily since then.

First, make a backup routine. ; )

But yeah, no idea. Which is not helpful at all. I have some 25+ year-old hard drives sitting on a shelf that work just fine today - these were units that saw daily 8+ hour use in machinery. 3 USB HDDs, one of which is more than 5 years old, with no problems. Had just one or two platter drives crap out on me ever.

If SSDs can come close to that, I'll be a happy customer. Maybe the first ones had issues but the typical advance of technology has likely made then much more reliable, even in just a few years time.

No, it's not a lie, and your tech friend is correct, but what's missing is a bit of technical explanation as to *why* it dies, to understand "when".

Basically, you have a given number of writes you can make on the disc before it dies... but, what counts as a "write" for a disc and what intuitively does for an user are quite different. Writing a 200 GB video file to your disc counts as a single operation, or close enough that it doesn't matter; used like that, it'd last 20 years with ease. Downloading something from BitTorrent, however, makes each piece count as a write by itself, making it much worse even for smallish files like an album from an indie band; your hardware's lifetime will be much lower as result, though I think it'd still be over 5 years with regular use, and some drives have an internal cache to turn many small writes into a larger one anyways.

The worst possible use, however, is as "swap memory", where the Operating System uses a file (for Windows; a whole partition, for Linux and other UNIX) as "backup" for the RAM and constantly reads and writes content to it, many times per second, in an attempt to offload some of the RAM's work. That, for memory-intensive operations, can *really* kill your disc's life expectancy... though since most OSes by default use the same disc they're installed on for swap, and most people install their OS on the SSD to improve boot times even with a HDD aside, it's not uncommon. There's also the fact that SSDs are much faster than HDDs for that use, much closer to RAM, so I've known a few photographers who buy SSDs precisely to use as swap for Photoshop, eating the hardware's cost to achieve much better performance than with HDDs or RAM alone on their profession. I believe they had to replace them every six months under such use cases, though, to avoid the danger of data loss.

It was not a lie when SSD first showed up. The firmware running the drives was so horribly inefficient it could theoretically kill your drives pretty fast. But like most technology once you get past that bleeding edge and learn more about how to make said technology more efficient it gets a lot better.

If people who have SSD never updated their firmware I would be concerned. Otherwise it shouldn't be a problem unless you're doing something unusual with your drive.

Here's a helpful article:

https://www.compuram.de/blog/en/the-life-span-of-a-ssd-how-long-does-it-last-and-what-can-be-done-to-take-care/

Like all technologies, the initial commercial entries of SSD technology had teething issues, and those are gradually going away as it matures. However, there are two things to keep in mind:

1: The type of SSD technology being used. SLC, MLC, and other LC determines how much capacity the drive has for the price point. However, this leads into the next bit...

2: Data retention requires the drive to powered on. If a SSD doesn't receive power for too long, data may be lost. The length of safe retention is based on the LC technology. Further, higher-capacity LC has reduced endurance over low-capacity methods like SLC. Speed is also affected.

Generally:

SLC is fast, tough, and expensive.
MLC is a moderate.
TLC is cheap, slow, and delicate.


In addition to this, keep in mind that the fabrication process of newer SSDs may lower their lifespan: 40nm SSDs have more endurance than 14nm. It has to do with the physics of electricity, which become increasingly difficult to correctly control in a smaller space.

I've had zero issues with my SSDs, and that includes two older 64 GB OCZs that many people reported as fail monsters. Of course, this is all just anecdotal. I'd recommend checking out some reliable tech sites to get more info on SSDs and their life span as opposed to what people say here on this or other forums (no offense intended to anyone that's replied in the thread already). There seems to be a lot of 'FUD' spread around about the lifespan of SSDs, so I'd depend on the experts for your info on this one.

As someone who had a SSD die on him, and now have a second in its death throes, you do can wear them out with excessive usage. However my use case is pretty hard on them, rebuilding tens of gigabytes of code every other day on a SSD which is mostly full, is wearing it down. The problem is that the warnings are few and far between and usually when you start to notice that something is wrong, you have a 50% chance that you have time to do extra backups.

Thank you very much for the input, guys, most of it was certainly reassuring.

Incidentally I just noticed that the warranty is actually five years OR 300 TB of data written which is a little less comforting (especially since one of them is already gone) but oh well, I guess all in all I can just go on living my life as before, just super fast. Like the Flash. Minus the crime fighting. Okay, I guess that's a bad example.

Anyway, per Draek's suggestion I've moved the pagefile to my HDD which will probably also be my target for video capture. But I guess that's the only steps I'm taking for now.

Again, thanks!

Edit: Also, I just noticed that there's a tool called Samsung Magician that actually allows tracking the number of TBs written to the drive. I guess I'll fire it up once in a while just to feel safe.

I'm no expert on this stuff, but what you've written is entirely contrary to my limited reading on the subject. I remember reading what you've said being true in early days of SSDs, but that was before they introduced wear levelling. As I understand it, it's not that the entire disk gets burned out in one flash (pun intended), rather "sectors" of the disk become unstable (not sure if this is directly analogous to HDD sectors). This is why it used to be the case that a 200GB file was considered as damaging as a single small file, as you were only writing to any one sector once, as obviously the large file was distributed over many sectors. Then when the small file was updated, it burned the same sector(s) again.

I think it was about 2007 that most flash drives and SSDs introduced wear levelling to address this. My rough understanding of it is that it introduces a layer of abstraction such that every write to the disk is distributed evenly over any free sector rather than a file persisting to the location is was originally in (that original sector is then marked as free, without the old data actually being removed, thus no write occurs to the old sector). This means that it is almost entirely data throughput that affects the wear on the disk, rather than any usage pattern. The only caveat to this is that the wear levelling is only applied to free space, such that if you pack 99% of your SSD with static files, then run your paging file on the last 1% of the disk, you'll not get the benefit. Apart from that, it's no different to run a page file or just write several large files, it's all about the volume of data written to the disk.

When I was building my last PC last year I put in a Samsung SSD and recall some tests showing SSDs likely have a greater life expectancy than mechanical hard drives now. Main negative I recall is that when SSD fails though, it's more likely to be toast. HDD might more often fail slowly with warning signs, but SSD might just go lights out more often and lose data. So backups still relevant for important files.

Here's a recent PC Magazine summary
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404258,00.asp

Well, I don't have any evidence as such, but I have three ssds, which have been running, not to heavy for (1 of them anyways) 5 years. I only really use them as programs storage though. The benefit of ssd is the speed, so opening and running things, wouldn't currently use them for storage as price per tb is way more than had. So a combination of both is still best.
Also, as with anything, never rely on it. Have multiples of everything as any drive can fail out of the box or 20 years down the line.

In my opinion it was not (at first) when compared with HDD. The problem with HDD is that you have two main players (Seagate and WD). I don't know if people remember, but many years ago, 5 years warranty was also the default for hard drives. Then the floods came (in Thailand or Taiwan, I can't remember where they make them), HDD prices skyrocketed and after they (WD and Seagate, what a nice coincidence that they did it at the same time) lowered their warranties.

had an ssd for 5 years and it did not die, and I did re installs on it like a mad man. ssd's have come a long way and are way more reliable than hdd's, HGST is the only harddrive next to the western digital red nas drives to be the most reliable hdds out there for long term media and file storage.

those m.2 2282 or whatever they are called are pretty much replacing regular ssd's over time as I see. I own the samsung 960 evo drive and that thing is a beast in speeds. 3000mb read and wright 2000mb or something. forgot the exact speeds of it.