How long will my SSD last?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
It's interesting, this is something that has changed fairly
dramatically over all, say, the last five or ten years.
We used to be very,
very frightened of using SSD's too much because they have a limited lifespan.
Flash memory that's used in both SSD
and in USB thumb drives wears out the more you write to it.
As it turns out, however,
the flash memory that is used for SSD at least recently,
turns out to have a surprisingly long lifespan before it dies.
And there are techniques you can use
to determine exactly where you are in its expected lifespan.
Let me show you what those are and how they go.
Now, the thing to download, is a program called CrystalDiskInfo.
It's a utility that will give you a lot of information actually about any
of the disks on your system. We'llwill be looking specifically at the SSD.
But if you want to dive into some
of the nitty gritty details about the rest of your drives, by all means,
you can use that as well when you fire up CrystalDiskInfo.
And I'm going to go ahead and bring a full screen here, the CrystalDiskInfo on one
of my SSD Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB.
What you're looking at is the default screen.
When I look at that drive in CrystalDiskInfo
the number we care about is called total host writes.
And you can see there that it's done
18,572 two gigabytes worth of writes.
What does that mean? Well,
if we take a look at the specification sheet for that drive and I'm not going
to bring that up, but you can for the drive you have,
you will need to go and find the specification sheet.
The thing to look for is, in fact, what CrystalDiskInfo is showing you here.
Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB.
If that's your SSD.
That's the string that I searched for and I found the spec sheet
for my drive on that spec sheet is a little piece
of information called TBW Terabytes written or terabytes writable.
You can see that it has a warranty of six hundred terabytes.
What does that mean?
Well, that means that Samsung,
the manufacturer in this case, will warranty this drive to operate
for at least six hundred terabytes of data being written to it.
If that fails before in this case five years or six hundred terabytes is written
to the drive, then they'll replace the drive.
Where am I on that scale?
Well, what we just saw in CrystalDiskInfo is I'm at 18,572
gigabytes or about 18 and a half terabytes.
So I'm still way, way early in this drive's expected life.
And I've had it for just about two years.
This, for me represents about two years worth of usage.
So if we do the math six hundred over 18, then it's going to last for me a very long
time, longer, I suspect, than the machine is itself is going
to either last or be useful as technology continues to advance.
So what this tells me is that my usage of this drive, that this C drive is
actually pretty reasonable and is probably going to last a long time.
Now I have two SSDs in this machine.
Let's look at the other one.
This is a Crucial CT2000P5SSD8 2TB.
All that really translates to if you were
to Google that specific number, is it a two terabyte drive
sold by Crucial one of the good drive manufacturers and drive resellers.
Here you can see that my total host writes has been 3572
gigabytes or about three and a half terabytes.
What's the warranty for this drive?
Well, if we take a look at what I found
on its spec sheet, which was a little hard to find, they claim twelve hundred.
TBW, what that means is that I'm nowhere near the lifespan of this drive.
This drive is going to last me a really
long time, again, depending on how I use it.
Interestingly, as I record this video,
the video itself is being written to that drive.
The editing that I do is being done on that drive.
So it's actually a pretty good drive
and it's going to last me for a very long time.
Now, I do have to make a an important point here.
There are no guarantees in life.
A warranty is not a guarantee.
This does not say we absolutely,
positively guarantee that this drive will not fail.
What it says is the manufacturer has enough faith in the quality of this drive,
that if it fails prior to the warranty having run out by either time or TBW,
they'll replace the drive or refund your money, whatever makes sense.
The drive still could fail.
It's just that the probability
of the drive failing is very, very low, low enough to make the manufacturer
comfortable offering that kind of a warranty.
But it could still fail.
What does that mean for you?
Well, let's look at it another way.
A warranty won't recover your data.
In this small risk of that drive,
failing, if it fails on you, your data is gone.
A warranty is not going to bring your data
back, a new drive is going to come back empty, a replacement or a refund of your
money is not going to refund or replace your data.
Backups, you still need to do backups, a good long lasting drive with a very high
life expectancy is not an excuse for not backing up.
You still must backup because it still could fail.
The only thing the warranty is really doing is protecting your wallet.
You're not going to be out the couple of hundred bucks or however many dollars
your SSD turned out to be if it fails earlier than the warranty.
Enjoy the SSD.
They're awesome, they're fast, if you're curious, use a tool like CrystalDiskInfo
to find out just where you are on that disc's lifespan,
but never, ever use any of that information as an excuse not to back up.
I hope this was helpful. I hope this was interesting for updates.
For links to related articles, for comments.
For more, visit Askleo.com/133201.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.