Lifespan of Solid-State Drives (SSD)

• Professor
• Apr 05, 2022
• Laptop Maintenance

Lifespan of Solid-State Drives (SSD)

A NAND Flash chip based SSD is a totally different storage media than the traditional hard disk drive which saves its data on a magnetic plate. It consists of an electronic controller and several storage chips.

SSDs have a very short access time, which makes them perfect for being used in environments where real time access and transfer is a necessity.

The downside of SSDs with the NAND Flash based chips is that they have a limited life span by default. While normal HDDs can – in theory – last forever (in reality about 10 years max.), an SSD lifespan has a built-in “time of death.” To keep it simple: An electric effect results in the fact that data can only be written on a storage cell inside the chips between approximately 3,000 and 100,000 times during its lifetime. After that, the cells “forget” new data. Because of this fact – and to prevent certain cells from getting used all the time while others aren’t – manufacturers use wear-leveling algorithms to distribute data evenly over all cells by the controller. As with HDDs the user can check the current SSD status by using the S.M.A.R.T. analysis tool, which shows the remaining life span of an SSD.

The final of the three metrics manufacturers might use when predicting the lifespan of their drives is the drive writes per day (DWPD). DWPD measures how many times users can overwrite the amount of available storage in the drive each day of its working lifespan. If an SSD has a capacity of 200 GB and comes with a five-year warranty, for instance, users can write 200 GB onto the drive every day for the warranty period before it fails. When in doubt, you can use an online SSD lifespan calculator to estimate the SSD’s lifespan.

The respective lifespan of SSDs and HDDs will change depending on how you use them. While HDDs may nominally offer more storage space than most SSD models, they’re more fragile because of their moving parts and are susceptible to damage. On the other hand, each P/E cycle degrades the SSDs, meaning there is a definite point when the SSD will no longer work.