Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Worried about SSD durability? A recently finished experiment will help you rest easy

Matthew S. Smith
By

samsung introduces its own 256gbit 48 layer nand chip solid state drive
JIPEN/Shutterstock
A year and a half ago PC enthusiast publication The Tech Report embarked on a complex experiment to answer a simple question; how long will solid state drives last? While manufacturer specifications suggested they should be good for a decade or more in a typical home PC, there was no casual way to verify that. Drives that fail sooner than expected could suddenly leave thousands of users without their data.

To reach an answer more quick The Tech Report rounded up a number of SSDs and subjected them to continual write cycles, with the goal of killing each drive as quickly as possible. There was some expectation, given the manufacturer quoted durability of the drives, that the first could go belly-up in months.

Recommended Videos

That’s not what happened. The least durable drive, a Samsung 840, started registering errors at about 200TB of written data, but it hung on until the 900TB mark. The most durable drive was a Samsung 840 Pro, which managed over 2.4 petabytes of writes, or 18 months of continual, absolutely constant use.

Related

All of the drives far exceeded the needs of an average home user. The weakest drive, the Samsung 840, was a 250GB drive, so the data written to it during the test was over 30 times more than the drive can handle at any one time. Obviously most users, even those in heavy-use enterprise environments, don’t fill a drive to its capacity, empty it, and then re-fill it time and time and time again.

The results of the experiment are pretty clear; solid-state drives are durable enough. Even affordable models can handle many years, and possibly decades, of use in a home desktop without running into errors related to wear on an SSD’s flash storage. In all likelihood a drive will succumb to some other problem, or simply be tossed as obsolete, before the flash chips inside go south. We’ve long recommended SSDs as an upgrade for users still stuck with a mechanical disk, and these results only bolster that argument.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Matthew S. Smith
Matthew S. Smith
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Matthew S. Smith is the former Lead Editor, Reviews at Digital Trends. He previously guided the Products Team, which dives…
A new supply shortage is now hitting SSDs and hard drives
Two Samsung SSDs on a graphics card.

Cryptocurrency miners are already blamed for the shortage of graphics cards in recent years, and the situation has become especially dire during the global pandemic when coupled with supply chain disruptions. If miners have their way, there's another important PC component that could become scarce. It's reported that if the new Chia cryptocurrency takes off, the PC industry and gamers may have to grapple with a shortage of storage, as inventory of hard disk drives and solid-state drives could quickly become depleted.

Unlike existing cryptocurrencies, the Chia currency heavily relies on storage space, as it's based on a "proof of space and time" model. On the other hand, currencies like Bitcoin are based on a "proof of work," which doesn't require as much storage.

Read more
Turbocharge your laptop by installing an SSD yourself
WD Blue 1TB SSD

Laptops are difficult to upgrade in a meaningful way. In many cases, the processor, motherboard, and video card are installed as a one-package setup. If one component fails, you can't simply swap it out -- you'll need to replace the whole trio, which can be timely and expensive. Typically, the only components you can manually upgrade are RAM and storage.

A good way to improve your laptop's performance is to swap out its mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) for a solid-state drive (SSD). It doesn’t change how quickly software runs -- that's all on the CPU. Instead, it improves the speed at which software loads and the speed at which software juggles data. That makes a PC feel much faster.

Read more
What is an SSD?
OCZ SATA SSD

With lower failure rates and a potentially longer life span, many people These days choose solid-state drives (SSDs) over mechanical hard drives. 

For anyone in the market for a new computer or an SSD, there are some things you should know before you spend a bunch of money. Our SSD guide will give you a better idea of how these drives work, what their advantages are, and what distinguishes different types of SSDs.
What is a solid-state drive?

Read more