My C: Evo is almost a decade old and in perfect condition. Meanwhile multiple HDDs have simply gone to rest during that time.

Think strategically when choosing a SSD for what specific purpose, use it as system drive and reading source, do not use them for torrents or downloads. For that you use a physical small cheap HDD. That way you could have SSD for god knows how long

 

I recently swapped my (5 years in heavy usage) Samsung Evo 1TB boot SSDs for a NVMe 2TB PCIe boot drive. Both Samsung report fine with Samsungs Magician software. They now hold some uncritical samples and VST libs that can easily be restored in case of a breakdown.

 

There are decades where nothing happens; and there is a day where decades happen
-Most SSDs

 

Pretty much my story. I've had a lot of SSDs (and more HDDs,) used heavily; internal, external, in constantly active rigs, 16hr+ sessions of heavy variety use, or as mass transfer units moving hundreds of gigs, sometimes terabytes at a time, and I've never had one die on me. I've stuck with what's served me well over the years, Samsung and Toshiba.

Shit, WD is my most hated brand ever—we have a history.
I have a cemetery dedicated to WD HDDs, as I kept getting them years back because my buddy got a deep discount on them, and he's had more than a handful get funky on him too (and not good funky, like George Clinton funky,) though not as many outright die. Maybe their SSDs are passable, but I know people who work in strictly tech fields who won't touch them.

 

i have an WD BLACK 500gb NVMe and its good so far... anyone know any GOOD app for windows to see the health of this kind of hardware? i know its an SSD but maybe its different cause, its an NVMe, im an ignorat at this...
oh i have it around 2 or 3 years? rarelly installed games like DOTA 2 or RUST, but now its full of music production apps... arturia analog lab v legit takes 4... 5 second to start in my studio one...

 

Knock wood, both my SSDs and HDDs have been running fine for a while now. Some of my HDDs are over a decade old.

Still, I buy new and relatively cheap (compared to years ago, that is) HDDs and back everything up. I have at least 5 of them lying around with over 4TB of data in each one. I still have my teenage computer from 20 years ago backed up and it still gives me and my friends big laughs.

I also managed to bring several failed HDDs back to life after years of inactivity. Still a mystery to me, as I did nothing I hadn't tried dozens of times before, and one day they just started running again. I don't keep important data on them of course.

I'm kinda obsessed with data storage, which doesn't really make sense cause the vast majority of my data is either stuff readily available online (but fuck streaming services, I wanna have my 350 000 albums I'll never listen to on a virtual physical medium thank you) or thousands upon thousands of photoshops I did of the grocery clerk who thinks he's a poet. Oh and endless Kontakt libraries I'll never use, but would kill myself if I couldn't access anymore.

 

SSDs are still a relatively new technology, but they have undergone a strong development in the last 10 years.
The controllers and wear levelling in particular are now mature.

In our small company we have about 80 SSDs in use. In laptops, desktops and NASs. Exclusively Samsung. Mostly EVO 4TB and now also ~ 20 QVO 8TB.
The oldest is a 500 GB Samsung 830 EVO as far as I know.
Of those ~80 all are still all running with no noticeable errors. However, we always took oversized SSD so that over-provisioning was guaranteed.
In the same time, 10 of the previously used HDDs died (out of ~50). That's 20%. Most of them in Laptops.
HDDs are far more sensitive to temperatures and shocks than SSDs in my experience, but that can't be helped in our case.
Thus we no longer use HDDs.

So during the average usage time of our hardwares of 5 years we don't worry about dead SSD.
Backups are of course mandatory.

Of course this is no valid statistics for other companies because of the low count and devices used outside their specifications (e.g. QVO in NAS)
But for SOHO users this may help with a decision about the SSD/HDD question.

 

I've only ever had two external drives die.
One failed after plugging it into a CDJ (typical), and the other one bricked after installing a low seed VST torrent (flux analyzer).
If neither of those events had happened I'm sure they would have lasted for many years to come, just like my other external SSDs and HDDs, one of which is still running fine after heavy use almost a decade later.

 

I'm looking at discount SSD on newegg, and I don't which brands are a waste of money. Thanks

 

For regular SSD's, Samsung is your best bet. Crucial would be next but may be a little trickier to setup.
For NVME SSD's, I've had my Sabrent's for over 4 years now with no issues whatsoever.

 

If you have a couple of GBs of RAM you can spare, it's not a bad idea to setup a RAM disk and put page file, temp folder, and browser cache files on it, to prolong your SSD's lifespan.

In Debian Linux that is /dev/shm folder. It's a nice dynamic RAM disk that grows as needed. I put temp files and browser cache there. Things that get written and rewritten constantly. It's also very fast, obviously. I use it for compiling programs from github, editing something - audio, photos, videos... quickly. It's great!

 

I periodically check "LIfetime Remaining" parameter, hoping 100% last in time.

 

Thanks for this tip! I followed your suggestion and even went so far as to put my entire browser profile on my RAM disk and it works great. But I cannot get that damn pagefile to to use my RAM disk. No matter what setting I change in Windows 10, it still exists in the root of C drive. Even after editing registry keys and rebooting, pagefile won't move and any keys I modified changes right back after rebooting.

 

Overprovisioning exists for a good reason. If you purchased a Samsung nVme, their Magician software comes with that facility. There are third parties who enable this feature too apparently. Not only does it prolong the life of the nVme, it also adds around 3% speed overall to the SSD. The most common setting uses about 10% of your drive to do this, and I have done it on mine and never looked back. Keep in mind that on a 1TB SSD you have around 931GB. You'll lose about 88GB of that for over-provisioning at the 10% setting (it's around 10%).

It's worth reading up on it.
https://thessdguy.com/how-controllers-maximize-ssd-life-over-provisioning/

 

Last edited by a moderator: Feb 20, 2024

I've only seen one die so far. Twas a youngster with some adhd issues, he was frustrated and began pounding on his hp laptop rather violently. Next day windows started having errors and things went downhill from there. I tried to rescue the data off it, but was unscucessful. - my guess he cracked a solder joint in the damn ssd.

on the upside the company got him a new computer and I kept the HP laptop and its now on my Arturia keyboard in the living room and works like a champ with a new SSD - it also had a spot for an hdd (nvme & sata slots) so its got both now.

I've been putting ssd in all my computers in the last 2 years, but I image them onto a HDD after getting things installed.
they're fast, but i don't trust the bastards yet.... none of my ssd are older than 24 months, so we will see which dies first...

 

yeah sectors can get weak magnetically and still be read by doing retries, that a sure sign things are going badly and to image and replace the drive. SSD just sort of resign without notice, not very graceful really...

 

I think that 5 year lifespan is just based on math. in reality I've got a 2005 dell laptop that still has the same drive in it as when I bought it and it still works well. I've got boxes of hard drives that I can still pull data from. I used to restore and repair drives out of medical equipment many were 15 or 20 years old when they failed. Some were merely 100% full which made the archiving software puke, easy fix, delete the old archive files...

 

this is the reason i bought BLUE ray burner.. and copy everything to blue ray discs

 

To my experience ... they last like HDD.
They can be dead on arrival too, die in some weeks/months too ...

I treat them like HDD. And expect the same failure rate.