SSD longevity

flhrci

Final Approach
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David
So SSD's have been around for a few years. Has any one actually had one wear out yet? As in storage locations could no longer be written to? I have always heard of this happening but my oldest Samsung SSD (250 GB) keeps on chugging along and still says it is in "GOOD" condition after 29.5TB written.
 
I've had a large number of SSDs at work fail over the years. The bad thing about SSDs, in my experience, is that they don't start making noises or throw warnings like rotational drives, they just immediately die. I have had pretty good luck with the Samsung's, but I make sure I have backups for anything that I want to have around tomorrow. I can't say I've seen any that wore out due to excess writes, but our work-loads don't generally push them hard.
 
Yep. I had an SSD flip to read-only mode unexpectedly on me. One of the early corsair 128gb I believe (P128 maybe?) Being new to the things and not realizing what a warning shot it was, I spent its remaining short life fumbling around to get write access re-enabled somehow. Then it just disappeared, never to return, no longer seen on the SATA port.
 
Any SSD worth trusting data to nowadays will report its wear leveling count via SMART. No point in calculating anything anymore, just ask the drive.

There’s little need to even calculate the lifespan anymore since the machine will be outdated before the SSD fails, but most consumer grade big brand drives will last about ten years under typical use. Pro models, longer.

But if it won’t just tell you via SMART ID number 177, the onboard controller is too old to bother with and probably missing all the caching features designed to make this a non-issue for almost everyone.

Mostly a problem of the past — if using modern big brand SSDs. Assuming you have something monitoring the SMART data.

YNMV on that. But you can check it with various tools, depending on OS.

I’ve got one older Samsung here I’ve just beat the holy hell out of nearly constantly for five years, even in multiple machines, that’s still reporting 80%+ lifespan left.
 
Most everything's been covered so I'll just add that Samsung is the most reliable brand I've used.
Running probably close to 100 over the last 5 years. I've switched everything else to m.2 pre-installed in the Dells lately. I'm hoping for similar reliability. :fcross:
 
Most everything's been covered so I'll just add that Samsung is the most reliable brand I've used.
Running probably close to 100 over the last 5 years. I've switched everything else to m.2 pre-installed in the Dells lately. I'm hoping for similar reliability. :fcross:

Dell is mostly using SK Hynix. We haven’t had any problems at all with them.
 
I've had a large number of SSDs at work fail over the years. The bad thing about SSDs, in my experience, is that they don't start making noises or throw warnings like rotational drives, they just immediately die. I have had pretty good luck with the Samsung's, but I make sure I have backups for anything that I want to have around tomorrow. I can't say I've seen any that wore out due to excess writes, but our work-loads don't generally push them hard.

I guess the newer SSDs are more built to last. Running daily my Samsung SSDs for 7 years without big problems.

Tried early PCI-E SSD with Raid 0 some years ago... died 3 times and got replaced 3 times as well.

Always do your backups !
 
Tried early PCI-E SSD with Raid 0 some years ago... died 3 times and got replaced 3 times as well.

RAID 0 is great. It multiplies your chances of complete unrecoverable failure. Heh.

Nowadays if you want PCI slot mounted drives you’re probably also getting into the realm of needing the features and performance in Intel Optane stuff.

Might be one of the only things anybody will want to buy from Intel until middle of next year at best.

They’re two full generations behind AMD as of this week and their mobile Gen 11 stuff isn’t even out yet which won’t catch up to AMDs previous Gen.

They’re a full blown disaster at the moment.
 
RAID 0 is great. It multiplies your chances of complete unrecoverable failure. Heh.

Nowadays if you want PCI slot mounted drives you’re probably also getting into the realm of needing the features and performance in Intel Optane stuff.

Might be one of the only things anybody will want to buy from Intel until middle of next year at best.

They’re two full generations behind AMD as of this week and their mobile Gen 11 stuff isn’t even out yet which won’t catch up to AMDs previous Gen.

They’re a full blown disaster at the moment.

The SSD chips on the card were designed to work in Raid 0, 6 drives... calculate the risks haha.

Will try a M2 disk soon, curious how they will work.
 
I had two in a row die on me a while back, second one was a replacement for the first under warranty. Both were Mushkin brand and same model, I've only bought Samsung drives since and haven't yet had a problem. Might have been a one-off thing with that model, don't know. Both times the initial symptom was corrupted files in windows causing system lockups which rapidly got worse to the point of the PC being unusable.
 
The SSD chips on the card were designed to work in Raid 0, 6 drives... calculate the risks haha.

Will try a M2 disk soon, curious how they will work.

Fun. LOL.

Remember there’s M2 SATA and M2 NVMe. Very different animals.

You don’t want M2 SATA unless the machine is so old that’s all it’ll do. :)
 
If you start getting annoying sector errors, just throw it in the washer with your underwear.

That'll fix it.
 
If you start getting annoying sector errors, just throw it in the washer with your underwear.

That'll fix it.

If you spill a bowl of rice on your laptop, I hear that fixes it. Avoid the orange sauce though. LOL.
 
I design for distributed RAID-6 in the enterprise and choose between disks rated for 5-years at either 1 or 5 DWPD. Five drive writes per day for five years would be an insanely high load and hard to hit even with constant database loads.

My “cheap” 1DWPD disks still make it five years without trouble.
 
If you spill a bowl of rice on your laptop, I hear that fixes it. Avoid the orange sauce though. LOL.
Pouring a cup of coffee into your laptop to speed it up doesn't work either. Maybe espresso would?
 
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