How SSDs work and what you can do to make yours last longer

swarfega · 21 Apr 2017

I feel secure in myself that SSDs are durable enough now that I only have SSDs in my system. Just shows how far the technology has come in a short amount of time. I couldn't have done that 5 years ago on reliability grounds.

AMDMan2016 · 21 Apr 2017

Since Getting my First SSD in Late February have learned a lot, haven't moved much data, except the personal files to my secondary 2tb storage drive, did move one Program since somehow I lost 1 percent of life on the SSD according to Dashboard program, but holding fine at 99 percent now. Have Left Pagefile alone

Do use 3rd party Antivirus, not sure if that is causing too much writing or not, just keeping eye on it weekly to make sure doesn't lose anymore life lol, but so far so good

wordsworth · 21 Apr 2017

Should one of the SSDs fail in this machine, I have an ingenious emergency plan for that contingency:

1. Buy a new one
2. Restore from a Macrium backup
3. Deal with the Intel warranty afterward

Really folks, if memory serves, I recall buying a 528MB Western Digital HD in the mid 1990s for at least twice what I paid for this 512GB Intel M.2 drive.

I’m less concerned about SSD failure today than I was about HDD failure in the 90s as, comparatively, that was expensive stuff, and replacement of a “fast” and “large” HDD then was a PITB in more ways than one.

I rebuilt this year and took the old parts to build a system for my brother which included an Intel 120GB SSD that's about seven years old; in SSD Toolbox the Health bar of that drive is barely off 100% and I've not done anything special to conserve writes except move the user profile to an HDD when I first built with it, something I did not bother with in subsequent clean installs.

cereberus · 21 Apr 2017

wordsworth said:

Should one of the SSDs fail in this machine, I have an ingenious emergency plan for that contingency:

1. Buy a new one
2. Restore from a Macrium backup
3. Deal with the Intel warranty afterward

Hardly rocket science eh!

Actually people forget rockets took man to the moon with computing power less than even the most basic tablet nowadays - now Chaos Theory - that is hard

.

badrobot · 21 Apr 2017

SSDs are getting cheap. By the time one dies without doing a "preservation", the new ones are probably at half the price already.

cereberus · 21 Apr 2017

NavyLCDR said:

I've often thought about starting a thread asking the simple question - Has anyone ever gotten even close to wearing out an SSD due to write cycles? My 4 SSDs, the oldest about 1 year old now, all still show 100% of life remaining in their factory dashboard programs. It just ridiculous the length that some people will go to prevent writing to an SSD.

Five year old cheapo generic brand ssd used heavily every day - 3℅ loss in five years. Even if I decided to stop using it when it got to say 21℅ loss, that would take another 30 years. I would fully expect that drive to outlast me - LOL.

Of course above is bs really as I would long since have upgraded ssd - hell SATA will probably be a footnote in the dustbin of history in 30 years time.

essenbe · 21 Apr 2017

I never did any of that stuff but have an Intel X-25M and an OCZ Vertex from about the second generation of SSDs and both are still running fine.

pparks1 · 21 Apr 2017

essenbe said:

I never did any of that stuff but have an Intel X-25M and an OCZ Vertex from about the second generation of SSDs and both are still running fine.

Yeah, my oldest SSD is an Intel X-25M and it's still working. It's about 8 years old. Too bad it's only 80GB and that just isn't big enough to do much with these days.

essenbe · 21 Apr 2017

pparks1 said:

Yeah, my oldest SSD is an Intel X-25M and it's still working. It's about 8 years old. Too bad it's only 80GB and that just isn't big enough to do much with these days.

Yea, mine's 80 GB too. For what I paid for 80GB, I could come close to buying a 1 TB SSD now.

dencal · 21 Apr 2017

Purchased in 2010 a Crucial C300 128GB SSD complete with data transfer kit which included a USB to SATA cable for £237.

The SSD alone costing £214.90....speeds being much lower than more modern ones, but its still working perfectly, far faster than any HDD.