SSD drives have undergone significant development over the last decade. In their early days, they were designed as an elite storage solution due to their high performance and high price, and finally were available to only a few people. It is true that their price per gigabyte is still high, but today their cost per gigabyte ratio has decreased so much that we can say that they have been democratized.

This type of storage drive also suffered from significant reliability issues in its early stages, which ultimately made HDDs the most recommended solution for regular users. This is completely normal because it didn’t make sense to make such an important investment from an economic point of view, end up with uncertainty as to whether our new SSD’s lifespan will be long enough for us to amortize it.

Fortunately, all the serious problems that SSDs presented in their early stages have been completely overcome. It is true that they are still not perfect and that their lifespan is not “unlimited”, but realistic there is no computer component that has “eternal life”and finally, we all need to be aware that what we buy in this sector will have a limited duration and that the amortization of the purchase we made will depend on the time we have been able to enjoy it.

The fact is that despite all that has passed, there are still a number of myths which revolves around SSD drives and which many users take for granted. This is not good because it only feeds lies based on things that are years out of date. For this reason, we decided to prepare this guide, where we will share with you the five most important myths related to SSD drives and explain what the current reality is in each of them.

1.-SSDs “die” soon: they have a short lifespan

This is one of the most important myths that still surrounds SSDs, the false belief that their lifespan is shorter than that of hard drives, and it reaches such an extreme that some still think they don’t even last a year. This is completely false, so much so that in fact, SSDs have a lower failure rate than HDDsaccording to data from a recent Backblaze report, the results of which can be found in the attachment.

If you look at the data, the failure rate of SSDs was lower than HDDs, despite the fact that the former included more samples. This is important as more samples are introduced into the test there is a greater chance that the failure rate will increase. It’s not a difficult relationship to understand, if you try 10 things, there will be less chance of one failing than if you repeat that test with 100 things.

SSD drives today use fully developed technologies, have several years of warranty and are ready to support without problems hundreds of TB (terabytes) of write cycles before failure occurs. If we are talking about useful life watches, it is easy to find models that are around between 2 million hours and 5 million hours. To be clear, these numbers are equivalent to 228 and 570 years. Yes, an SSD can fail sooner than expected, but this is a problem that affects any storage unit and these are isolated cases that should not be considered a general rule.

2.-Only SLC or MLC units are really worth it

Source: Kingston.

A topic that also has its moments of furious current affairs, especially as the transition to various NAND Flash memory technologies has occurred. those transitions were necessary for the realization of the expected democratization of SSD drives and were completed with great success. Unfortunately, there are still those who insist that only SLC or MLC memory drives are worth it, which is not true.

It is true that the type of memory used in an SSD affects its lifespan and performance, but That’s not to say that an SSD with TLC memory can’t be a good choice.or unreliable. SLC memory only stores one bit per cell, so it is the most durable and fastest memory, but it is also so expensive that it makes no sense to use it in the general consumer market.

MLC memory stores two bits per cell, which means it has lower resistance than its predecessor and lower performance, but is cheaper and for this reason has been used in many mainstream consumer memory units, especially in the high range. We get to TLC memory, which stores three bits per cell and greatly reduces lifetime and performance, but it makes up for it with much lower costs. Thanks to this type of memory, we find 1 TB SSD drives with good performance and prices under 100 euros.

Let’s look at it with a concrete example, an SSD as cheap as the 240 GB Kingston A400, which costs 28.99 euros and uses TLC memory, has a write life of 80 TB, which corresponds to completely write to disk 320 timesand 1,000,000 hours of use, which corresponds 114 years in continuous operation. It’s easy to double, triple, or even quadruple these numbers on larger capacity drives.

In terms of performance, SSD with TLC memory reach an optimal level without any problems, even in its most economical configurations. The Kingston A400 we named clocks in at 500MB/s sequential read and 350MB/s sequential write, which are very good numbers for a cheap SATA III drive. PCIe Gen4 models are steadily approaching the 7GB/s sequential read barrier.

3.-The price of SSD disks is not worth it, they are too expensive

One of the big lies in this sector is undoubtedly the question of price. Yes, SSDs have a higher price per gigabyte than HDDs, but the price it is compensated by a number of advantages that in the end it is very worthwhile to invest, which the purchase of an SSD represents:

• They reach much higher speeds, So much so that a cheap, low-end NVMe PCIe Gen3 SSD can deliver ten times the performance of a regular HDD.
• They have much faster access timeswith minimal latency, making the system’s response virtually instantaneous.
• It does not suffer from the problem of fragmentationallowing them to maintain excellent performance levels throughout their lifetime, even after performing large erase and write cycles.
• Significantly reduce loading times in gamesoperating systems and applications, in some cases a game that takes more than a minute to load on an HDD can complete the process in less than ten seconds on an SSD.
• They can improve performance especially in games and applications that require a constant flow of data and files.

Is it worth giving up all those benefits? For most users, the answer is a very clear no, although I understand that there are still cases of very entry-level users who don’t really see the value of an SSD. However, we cannot say that the price of SSD drives is not worth it and that they are too expensive. On the contrary, they offer excellent value for what it’s worth, especially if we compare them directly to HDDs.

4.-SSD speed is not really used, it is useless

There is some truth to this myth, but we must interpret it correctly. It is true that there are very powerful SSDs, such as models that achieve sequential read and write speeds close to 7 GB/s, They don’t take full advantage in the mainstream consumer market, but that doesn’t mean SSD speed is useless or doesn’t make sense.

There are many uses in which such a high transfer rate allows us to move large amounts of data and files in a matter of seconds with HDD it can take hours. On the other hand, keep in mind that we’re in a transition phase and it’s only a matter of time before high-performance SSDs get the love they need to make an even bigger difference.

In this sense, we must remember what Microsoft’s DirectStorage will mean, a technology that will mark a before and after in this sector and that will allow video games to take advantage of PCIe NVMe SSD drives more deeply. It will also reduce the impact that data decompression has on the CPU. move this task to the GPU.

We could already see a demonstration of its potential in Forspoken, the first PC game to implement it, and the results were spectacular because it was possible double the decompression speed from 2.8 GB/s to 4.8 GB/s. The difference in load times between using a SATA III and PCIe SSD with said game is also apparent, 2.2 seconds vs. 4.6 seconds.

5.-SSD requires special care and very limited use

This false belief is based on some of the myths we’ve already debunked and makes people believe that they need to treat their SSD like it’s a piece of Murano glass. Nothing is further from reality, an SSD drive has a high resistance to impacts and shocksand to mechanical parts are missing it is a bit “heavier” than HDD.

Using SSD is as easy as using HDD, there is nothing special we have to do or what to consider. There’s nothing wrong with deleting one game and reinstalling the other, and we won’t have to bother with the defrag processes that would normally drag the HDD through long erase and write cycles.

It’s true that write cycles accumulate and that eventually an SSD has a limited lifespan, but for it to wear out prematurely we would have to make abnormal use of it. Let’s look at an example and restore the Kingston A400, which we named earlier. Its lifetime expressed in terabytes is 80, which means that we would have to fill it completely 320 times.

If you were to write 240GB per day, it would take almost a year at the end of its life cycle and it is obvious that the write speed is completely abnormal for the average user. The average user can usually go days or even weeks without doing a major write operation, and many don’t do it for months, so the actual lifespan of this Kingston A400 under normal average use would be several years. Higher capacity drives have higher write cycles to exactly compensate for this higher storage capacity.