SSDs have completely done away with hard drives as the default standard for PC internal storage, both in new models and as upgrades to existing equipment. And it is that its advantages are stunning performance, energy efficiency, noise, size and the absence of moving parts.

Hard drives really only beat these hard drives in price per GB, which is why they’re still stored in servers and data centers. But what about durability? How long does an SSD really last? Can you estimate the time left before it starts to fail?

SSD lifetime

To begin with, all electronic products that use NAND flash memory to store information (such as SSDs) have a limited lifespan simply by their very design. Memory cell wear and tear is something inherent to this technology and to successive writes individual memory cells erode both capacity and performance.

Therefore, most SSDs contain additional free memory cells so that they do not lose storage capacity when the first ones fail. Plus, they automatically redistribute bad sectors so you don’t lose data or performance.

The theoretical SSD specs say they are equal to or outperforms hard drives in terms of strength and robustness. Manufacturers tend to judge the reliability of their drives using factors such as standard age, mean time between failures, or MTFB, and perhaps the most important value, the total number of Tbytes written by the drive, which you’ll see as TBW.

Investigations carried out so far, literally “crushing” these drives to more accurately determine their lifespan, have confirmed that the values ​​​​set by manufacturers are quite conservative, and that the amount of “terabytes written” taken as a reference is actually superior.

In total. A regular user performing “normal” computing tasks you don’t have to worry. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll wear it out, and barring serious electrical failures, which they’re more prone to than hard drives, in most cases it’ll still be fine when you replace it.

How much time do I have left on my SSD?

It is not possible to accurately determine the lifespan of an SSD, but yes an estimate can be made. It depends on the type of memory used (single-layer SLC lasts longer than one using four-layer QLC), controller and other parameters.

The industry is accepting an average of about 700 TB of data written to disk before the trouble starts. And that’s a good starting point for determining its condition. There are apps that can help you figure this out. One of them is CrystalDiskInfo (from the same vendor as the popular benchmark for measuring storage performance). If you want to meet him:

• Install the latest version of CrystalDiskInfo (8.17.6 for Windows).
• Run the application and you will see the result as in the picture.

• In it we will see a lot of information, such as the specific drive installed, which in this case corresponds to the SSD that Samsung sells to the OEM. We will also see the version of the NVMe protocol used or supported features that are important for this type of drive, such as TRIM or SMART.

As far as we are concerned in this longevity and durability article, we have to go to the results “Health condition”where we can see three values:

• Good. You have nothing to worry about yet. % will indicate its level.
• Attention. It means the SSD is degrading and you should make sure you have active file backups in case it fails for good. For production equipment, it is recommended to replace it before it is too late.
• Not good. The SSD is at the end of its life and you’re lucky it’s still booting. Immediate change is required.

In addition to these parameters, quite visual and clear, another value that can indicate the state of the SSD is “Total number of host entries”. which highlights the written Tbytes we quoted above.

For the tests we offer you, for example, we have used a laptop many times, where we install and uninstall systems and applications. It is almost a few years old and as you will see in the picture, the 5890 GB is very far from the 700 TBW we take as a reference.

Almost all storage solution manufacturers supply drive management software that you can use. In addition to firmware updates and performance tests, they also provide a lot of information about the health of the drive.

Other parameters to consider

The Product warranty offered by manufacturers can give us another good clue. Most drives of the current generation (midrange M.2 PCIe and higher) are sold with a five-year warranty. Quite a long time for a computer component that, as we said, you can replace before and is still in very good condition.

The MTBF is another of the values ​​used to determine unit life and gives the “mean time between failures”. If the MTBF of your SSD is 1 million hours, that means the probability of failure is 0.03% during the warranty years.

Summary. SSDs don’t last forever due to memory cell wear, but extra cells that act as replacements, high write data support, warranty and mean time between failures, ensure many years of use.