Here's an idea that might save you some headaches. Download the free ClearDiskInfo and run it. It will tell you the approximate percentage of life left in your SSD before it becomes read-only. My 500 GB SSD, probably a Samsung 850, is at 31%. When it gets a bit lower, I'm going to copy the contents onto a new SSD and use the old one as backup - read-only.
I wonder how many people use it;
how long the SSD they tested has been in use;
what do they consider their SSD usage (heavy; medium; or light).
TriX
Loc: Raleigh, NC
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it until your writes slow down or fail - the limit is on the max number of write and erase cycles since each write, which is preceded by an erase, degrades the SSD - the number of reads is essentially not limited, so unless you do a LOT of writes, no need to worry. Not sure what crystal disk info is looking at, but it really has no way of knowing how many writes you’ve made over time to the disk. Perhaps looking at the amount of free space or some SMART parameter? For a real world reference, I have a 180GB Intel SSD that has been in service since 2008 or 2009. It was used as the “C” drive on my old machine so it had lots more writes than a data only drive where you often write once and read many. In fact, it was 98% full when I moved it over to my backup server, erased some aps to open up the free space, and now it’s the C drive (with the OS) in my backup server.
TriX wrote:
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it until your writes slow down or fail - the limit is on the max number of write and erase cycles since each write, which is preceded by an erase, degrades the SSD - the number of reads is essentially not limited, so unless you do a LOT of writes, no need to worry. Not sure what crystal disk info is looking at, but it really has no way of knowing how many writes you’ve made over time to the disk. Perhaps looking at the amount of free space or some SMART parameter? For a real world reference, I have a 180GB Intel SSD that has been in service since 2008 or 2009. It was used as the “C” drive on my old machine so it had lots more writes than a data only drive where you often write once and read many. In fact, it was 98% full when I moved it over to my backup server, erased some aps to open up the free space, and now it’s the C drive (with the OS) in my backup server.
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it until your wri... (
show quote)
If the SSD in my laptop is good for 10+ years (the longevity of my previous laptop), I'm good.
niteman3d
Loc: South Central Pennsylvania, USA
Thanks for the tip on the app! That makes me feel a little better about my SSD which I have been wondering about these last few days since recovering from a PSU failure which scared the heck out of me (stale backups, of course). The machine is around four years old and the SSD is still at 65% and is in good shape in all the categories shown.
TriX
Loc: Raleigh, NC
Mistake in my earlier post. the intels have been is service 11 years, so 2011. The Samsungs maybe 2-3 years, so we’ll see how they stack up to the Intels. They are FAST though. The 980 Pro benchmarks at 6.6 HB/sec (!) on reads on my machine.
To put that in perspective. I worked for the company that built the first 100 MB/sec Fibrechannel disk array and that was a VERY big deal in the industry in the 90s - the DOD was all over them and they cost $.50/MB (those are MB, not GB). No other industry in the world has seen performance/$ increases like this - the advances in Silicon have just been phenomenal.
Hmm, the app shows the SSD on this laptop has almost 5,000 powered on hours, and 100% of drive life remaining. That brings the usefulness/accuracy of ClearDiskInfo into question.
I think what happened with this machine is that I recorded a lot of video using the C drive. It wrote many dozens of hours to that SSD before I transferred them to D and edited them. C was the default for the screen recording program, so I left it that was. My son's Dell is about the same age as mine, and he has less than half the "Written" count that I do.
Just think about all the "writes" to the SSD that the browser cache does when browsing thousands of places on the web.....
Visit a lot of websites??
jerryc41 wrote:
I'll have to cut down.
Probably 90% of my disk usage.....
bwana
Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada
jerryc41 wrote:
Here's an idea that might save you some headaches. Download the free ClearDiskInfo and run it. It will tell you the approximate percentage of life left in your SSD before it becomes read-only. My 500 GB SSD, probably a Samsung 850, is at 31%. When it gets a bit lower, I'm going to copy the contents onto a new SSD and use the old one as backup - read-only.
After two years of usage my 2TB SSD is still showing 98% life. I'm sure my computer and I will be dust before the SSD craters in 100 years!
bwa
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