SSD Average Life Span?

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Carlosinfl

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I have a broken leg so I'm really bored around the house. I decided to upgrade my Samsung 840 EVO firmware. I have a 500 GB SSD which is my 1st ever SSD purchase. I noticed while upgrading the firmware and tinkering around in the utilities, there's a section that has a total drive life calculation of writes. I read / was told (can't remember) that SSD's are only good up until a specific usage point. I was curious what is 'this' point? What happens and how can I bench my drive to understand where exactly it falls in terms of expected performance? I am mildly worried as one can be for a small electronic device that w/ all the installations of Linux and OS X, the drive may have been extra stressed. I still have no idea how Linux handles TRIM and such so that could play a factor in my drive health.

Thanks for any information!
 
Allot.

Some drives have been shown to last over a petabyte of data written. That is allot, best thing to do is look at how much writing you do to the drive a day/week. If the drive lasted one petabyte, you would have to write almost 300GB to the drive every day for 10 years.

For most people, the life of the drive will be FAR longer than its useful life span.
 
I still have no idea how Linux handles TRIM and such so that could play a factor in my drive health.
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linux has supported TRIM for years although depending on your filesystem you may need to enable it.
 
The lifespan of an SSD drive is only partially the write-endurance of the drive, it is also the NAND longevity. This is exasperated by how long you leave the drive shut down without electricity, but if you leave your computer running more often than not, it's not a concern.
 
Valnar said:
The lifespan of an SSD drive is only partially the write-endurance of the drive, it is also the NAND longevity. This is exasperated by how long you leave the drive shut down without electricity, but if you leave your computer running more often than not, it's not a concern.
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its odd because when i first heard about SSDs like 10 years ago they were supposed to not have that issue i thought.
 
Valnar said:
The lifespan of an SSD drive is only partially the write-endurance of the drive, it is also the NAND longevity. This is exasperated by how long you leave the drive shut down without electricity, but if you leave your computer running more often than not, it's not a concern.
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There was a bunch of bullshit media reports earlier this month, spreading panic about how if you leave an SSD off for a week it will lose all of its data. Here's the debunking article.

The short story is, yes, you can make an SSD lose all of its data in a week - if you run it at 25C (77F) and then store it at 55C (131F) for a week. Who does this? Not you or me. Run it at 40C or less and store it at 25C (77F) or less, and it will keep data for 2 or more years without power.

(SSDs are not yet a good choice for deposit box backup storage, because unpowered data retention, while long, is not unlimited. Use HDDs instead.)
 
evilsofa said:
There was a bunch of bullshit media reports earlier this month, spreading panic about how if you leave an SSD off for a week it will lose all of its data. Here's the debunking article.

The short story is, yes, you can make an SSD lose all of its data in a week - if you run it at 25C (77F) and then store it at 55C (131F) for a week. Who does this? Not you or me. Run it at 40C or less and store it at 25C (77F) or less, and it will keep data for 2 or more years without power.

(SSDs are not yet a good choice for deposit box backup storage, because unpowered data retention, while long, is not unlimited. Use HDDs instead.)
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I remember this as well, however, even then I question how they came to this.

I have quite a few USB drives, some for the HU in my car, and a portable SSD, both of them have been left in my car (Texas, middle of summer) for over a month without use, can get well over 200F inside, the one of the USBs spent all summer in the car without use (forgot in glove box), all data was just fine and the USB is still in use today.

I think the claims they were making were worse case in every possible way.
 
The quality of the flash and how well the controller manages wear leveling will impact how long it will work...

Generally for a typical 'office / home' type usage most SSDs will last a decade or more.

If you're a bit more demanding doing development / video editing / other write-intense storage tasks then the better drives (Samsung EVO series, MLC, etc) will still last you 5-10 years easily.

If you're very very demanding (24/7 video recording / 100MBps writes continuously) you could wear out most consumer drives in a matter of months or years ... in that case you should pick up one of the more expensive enterprise models meant for that workload (Samsung PRO series, SLC, etc) and they will last 5-10 years of that abuse.

Here's a great article where they torture test many consumer drives to death.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
 
...also worth noting, the larger the drive is the more write-endurance it has. Basically each cell has a certain endurance, and if you've got more cells you've got more total writes for the drive's lifespan. This is compounded somewhat by wear leveling -- meaning your 500GB drive should put up with significantly more writes than an 840 128GB or 256GB drive, for instance.
 
SSD's should be able to be powered off for 1-2 years without losing data. I wouldn't go much longer than that though.
 
bigdogchris said:
SSD's should be able to be powered off for 1-2 years without losing data. I wouldn't go much longer than that though.
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I would probably agree (but I have no first hand testing for that long), however, I think we all know SSD is not for long term storage/archiving, nor is it cost effective for that.
 
I manage around 80 computers where I work, all but about 5 have SSDs, and in the last 5 years I have had a total of 2 SSDs die and it wasn't because of them wearing out. They just failed completely. Most likely a controller failure in both cases.

Before I moved to SSDs for everything possible, HDDs failed a lot more often, both in media failures as well as mechanical failures.
 
bigdogchris said:
SSD's should be able to be powered off for 1-2 years without losing data. I wouldn't go much longer than that though.
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Exactly, which is purely a function of the NAND size, not wear-leveling, write-endurance, trim, controller quality or anything else. 32nm is simply going to last longer than 16nm NAND. Hopefully this 3D V-NAND will reverse some of that trend.
 
Valnar said:
Exactly, which is purely a function of the NAND size, not wear-leveling, write-endurance, trim, controller quality or anything else. 32nm is simply going to last longer than 16nm NAND.
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Incorrect.

The unpowered data retention time of flash depends on a number of factors. One big factor is how many erase/write cycles the flash has endured. At the beginning of its life, the flash should be able to retain data unpowered for 10 years. After consumer flash has reached its rated number of erase cycles, it should be able to retain data for 1 year. Beyond its rated number of erase cycles, the data retention time will continue to decrease until it becomes unusably short.

If you have fresh 16nm flash, and compare the unpowered data retention time to 32nm flash that has already reached its rated number of erase cycles, then the 16nm flash is going to have a much longer unpowered data retention time than the 32nm flash.
 
JoeComp said:
If you have fresh 16nm flash, and compare the unpowered data retention time to 32nm flash that has already reached its rated number of erase cycles, then the 16nm flash is going to have a much longer unpowered data retention time than the 32nm flash.
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Well duh. All else being equal, of course.
 
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