jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

There's a lot to digest here.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reliable-are-ssds/?utm_campaign=Blog%20RSS&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=252436115&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_NlL-LUucOvtqu8W4SuK7IlAgRI95NTLJzdFUEQuyr7O4CXpAwoEtgbEraEYtHxJep3ijQEpCW9N0h5zjyeGaurdYz4g&utm_content=252436115&utm_source=hs_email

jerold222 Loc: Southern Minnesota

3 to 5 years for an SSD, Many people keep their laptops much longer than that. I may have to start replacing a few SSDs.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

It seems to me that the weak point for SSDs is their limited write-life. Yes, they do allow for a lot of writing, but it is also limited. I don't have a business that uses lots of data, so I doubt I'll ever reach that limit, but still, knowing that it will stop writing at some point is annoying. I have HDDs that are over ten years old and still working.

Jimmy T Loc: Virginia

Good info, thanks for posting

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Don’t. Server farms such as Backblaze subject their SSDs to a hugely higher number of write/erase cycles (which is what limits their life) compared to a “normal” user as they are used in a highly transactional environment. For example, the popular Samsung 980 Pro 1TB drive is spec’d at 600 TB written. In other words, you’d have to write the ENTIRE drive 600 time before you reached the limit, so unless you’re using the drive in a server environment with many clients constantly writing, it’s just a non issue. By way of example, I have Intel SSDs that have been in service as my most used drives for >10 years so far. And even if you ever reached the limit, you’d still be able to read the existing data just fine.

jerold222 Loc: Southern Minnesota

Thank you, that sounds closer to what I would have suspected.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

I checked out the URL posted by Jerry. Found this quote in the article, "Under normal use we can expect an SSD to last years. If you replace your computer every three years, as most users do, then you probably needn’t worry about whether your SSD will last as long as your computer. What’s important is whether the SSD will be sufficiently reliable that you won’t lose your data during its lifetime."
Now if I based the average frequency that UHH members update their systems then the statement that the average user updates their systems mentioned in the article above as being 3 years is patently untrue. I actually know 100's of users and none of them change systems every 3 years, few business's do but not sure about government departments. So no idea where they get their views from ?
Both our home systems are getting on towards 10 years old now (high end specs when built though) and upgraded with SSDs a few years back. These have both been upgraded because of reported errors (although non critical yet) by Hard Disk Sentinel.
And if the SSDs last only 3 years then this means you should not touch a secondhand PC or laptop using an SSD as the boot device because it will have a known limited lifetime and require replacing.
My personal experience has been (averages) -
The better the hard drive (this means usually more expensive) the longer it will last - 5 to 10 years or more.
SSD's will typically last 3-5 years but will require replacement.
If a drive fails then you have a better chance of extracting something from an HDD rather than an SSD.
Heavily used laptops (more likely applying to those who have a laptop rather than a desktop) could expect an SSD failure at 2-4 years.
Following on from this I guess that using an SSD for backups, especially when traveling, where they won't get a lot of writing the SSD could be a good choice. I have a 1TB SSD built into a USB stick which is lightening fast so just waiting until they come as a 4TB option. But long term backups will still stick to high end enterprise HDDs.
There is a slight downside to high capacity SSDs especially used in USB sticks (eg an M.2 NVMe SSD mounted in some sort of miniature USB housing is that they get very hot. My 1TB mentioned above gets very hot after some copying.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Please see my post above and read the specs for the particular SSD you’re considering. The 3 year number is NOT correct. In addition to the spec (600 TB written in the case of the Samsung 980 Pro for example). How long do you estimate it would take in your home computer to write 600 TB to a specific drive? In terms of actual experience, I have 5 Intel SSDs in service ranging from 6-10 years old and 5 Samsungs ranging from 2-5 years with zero issues. I’d take the data from various storage monitoring tools with a grain of salt as they are often wildly incorrect. Often, they have no idea of the total TB written spec for the drive under test. Even the monitoring SW showing % of life left from the manufacturer is suspect - they’re in the business of selling new product. Forget all this worrying - just use the SSD, and if it EVER has issues with writes (which I’ve never seen), just replace it then - all your data that’s already been written is safe and readable.

There is so much incorrect data constantly propagated about SSDs, the majority dealing with the first Gen products a decade ago, some from companies selling disk monitoring SW, and even some from HD manufacturers that see their market slipping away. It’s just like using cloud storage for disaster recovery - lots of scary stories and misconceptions, while in the meantime, professionals just adopt the new proven technology and enjoy the advantages. And finally, all data storage components eventually fail (SSDs just take longer than HDs), so you should have 3 copies of your data - a working copy, a local backup copy, and an off-site disaster recovery copy. Benchmark your system if you like to make sure it’s performing up to spec, and then just leave it alone and use it unless you experience a problem.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

The 3 year number is probably mostly not correct but has nothing to do with the age of the SSD.
It was a reference to the assumption that every user changed his system every 3 years and therefore most likely the system would be out before the SSD (and of course pity the next user).
One of my SSDs that had failed was an Intel and the other was a Samsung. Both the failures were SMART errors and I have learnt over time not to ignore them at least with hard drives. There probably hasn't been enough long term experience with SSDs to know yet just how accurate SMART reporting will be or even the significance of it. Both drives were operated for 6 months after the first report with no problems. Both drives had the errors reported AFTER several years of okay operation. There are a couple of areas with SSDs that are not clear. Okay so they say they are good for up to say 600TB (for example). What exactly does this mean ? If you copy a fresh 2TB in a day then that theoretically means the drive will only last 300 days. A hard drive will last much longer than that. And I suspect that there are areas of a drive that Windows will hammer with frequent changes. An SSD is meant to allow 5000 to 100,000 writes to a specific locations. It wouldn't take too long to exceed that. So using an SSD as your boot drive would indicate that it was far more likely to fail early than an SSD used as a backup drive.
Which my experience, so far, would indicate as being correct since it was 2 boot drives on daily used desktops that threw up errors. Maybe I was just unlucky ? Several laptops with boot SSDs are still going fine but they don't get used daily. Their use is maybe a twentieth (1/20) of the desktops.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I take your points, and for HDs, the storage manufacturers I have worked for typically monitored asymptoting unrecoverable errors and other parameters to predict drive failures. Now whether parameters like that are good predictors of SSD failures, I have no idea, but I will ask a couple of my old storage design engineering friends their opinion and report back. What specific SMART parameter was increasing?

Regrading exceeding the max TB written spec in a short period, that’s an issue with HPC customers, but what individual consumer on UHH ever writes 2TB/day, day-in-day-out? If you did, you’d fill a 22TB HD (one of the largest WD sizes) in 11 days, so the max TB written would never be achieved unless you wrote 2TB on NEW data and erased the old every day - nothing you or I or any other UHH users need to worry about. Personally, I never monitor SSDs (although I do have the SW installed). I have a backup and DR copy and spread my data across multiple drives, so if one fails, I’ll deal with it when it occurs - I’m not running a data center

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

To my eternal regret I did not take note of what the SMART parameters were. From memory it was something to do with bad blocks and reallocations (?).
Re the constant rewriting - my backup routine consists of taking a snapshot of the source and destination files and anything that changes gets copied. I have one file of 50GB that never changes. But there are others, none over 1GB that get completely rewritten. But if you happen to have a 1TB (for example) database that changes daily then it will overwrite in its entirety each day (obviously depending on how you set up and how often you do backups etc). It won't take too long before you reach very large transfer numbers. Possibly well before you were expecting it. I have seen scenarios just like this happen.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

But that’s not the correct way to backup or the way it’s normally done in enterprise computing. You should just write changes and new files (incrementals). No need to write the whole thing.

I’m not trying to sell you SSDs, just stating that most of the objections are based on long outdated information, or mistrust of change/new technology or are propagated by some with a self interest. One of the older oft quoted critiques of SSDs was written by the head of Seagate marketing many years ago. If you need 20 TB of storage, SSDs will likely be too expensive. If you don’t need the speed and the reliability doesn’t matter, use a HD, and if you’re in an application such as HPC computing where you constantly checkpoint and write/erase constantly, SSDs may not be the best choice, but for the vast majority of users on this forum, there is nothing you can do better to increase speed and reliability than use SSDs. HDs have had a long great run and gone from 10MB to 20TB, but the run is coming to and end, just like many things that used to depend on mechanical devices and now use electronics. The writing is on the wall…