SSD Longevity

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[RetiredGeek]

Hey Y’all,

A lot has been written about the longevity of SSDs and I just ran across this How-to-Geek article on the topic. So I thought I’d check out my personal experience with SSD longevity since currently all my machines are SSD ONLY! I only use HDDs for my NAS and Backups.

Purchase History from my MS Money:

So here’s what is currently still in use:

Daily Driver Dell XPS 8920:
Boot Drive: Samsung Evo 960 M.2 NVME 250Gb 04/15/18 (5 yrs*) 13.5 TBW
Data Drive: Samsung 850 Pro 2.5″ 250Gb 08/09/17 (5.5 yrs) 6.5 TBW
Data Drive: Samsung 850 Pro 2.5″ 250Gb 08/09/17 (5.5 yrs) 1.0 TBW

*Started out with the 2 850’s but added the M.2 MVME 6 months later didn’t get it to work till another 6 Months later when Dell updated the BIOS so I could boot from it!

Test Machine Dell XPS 8700:
Boot Drive: SanDisk Extreme Pro 2.5″ 240Gb 09/08/14 (8.5 yrs) N/A TBW
Data Drive: Sandisk ULTRA II 2.5″ 960Gb 07/12/16 (6.75 yrs) N/A TBW

Laptop Dell Inspiron 137000:
Single Drive: Samsung 850 Evo 2.5″ 250Gb 08/22/15 (7.5 yrs) 9.4 TBW

The ADATA is in my Dell 530 running Mint Linux which has been sitting in storage since we moved to a CCRC 2.5 years ago. I’ll have to dig it out and see if it still works!

From this unscientific study I’d say SSDs are pretty reliable.
Of course as always YMMV!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

• This topic was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by RetiredGeek.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by RetiredGeek.

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Will Fastie, Kenneth Stephens, NaNoNyMouse, TechTango, cyberSAR, Cybertooth, Sueska, Charlie, Alex5723

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@RetiredGeek my experience pretty much mirrors yours. The only caveat I’ll add is I have had a few that went belly-up with absolutely no warning as is somewhat normal for spinners. Also I have found data recovery to be much harder if not impossible on these compared to spinners. I tend to use ssd for most everything and spinners for data storage – esp large stores.

Will also mention that I have had more spinners fail in warranty/short periods than ssds over last few years.

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cyberSAR wrote:

Also I have found data recovery to be much harder if not impossible on these compared to spinners.

Data recovery from an up-to-date drive image is casually simple and easy.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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Data recovery from an up-to-date drive image is casually simple and easy.

Agreed. Unfortunately, not everyone does backups, as I see almost daily!

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I bought a 13″ MacBook Pro in 2012. I upped the RAM to 16GB.  At Christmas 2014 I put a 500GB Samsung 840 SSD in it. For a  long time it was running three Parallels VMs (XP, Win7 and Win10). I took the XP off of it when they finally stopped the XP updates. Two years ago, I removed the other two VM’s. But it is still humming, even Catalina was the last eligible MacOS.

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Never used SSD drive before. My Windows 3.1 hard drive is still functional well (over 30 years). My Windows 98 hard drive is fine as well (over 24 years). My Windows Xp hard drive is semi fine but might be failing soon. Windows 7 hard drive failed 3 years after the extended warrenty ended. Bought another hard drive and failed after 1.6 years. Bought a third one and fine for now.

From my experience, it seems old hard drivers were made better than the new once that fail.

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Reboot times are minimal.  You don’t know what you are missing out on.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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I have recently brought new life to a really old DOS computer, circa 2000 Tyan motherboard, by rigging up an mSATA drive to work through the system’s IDE interface.  And I wrote about it.  The difference in reliability between an aging IDE drive and an SSD is hard to comprehend.  The difference in speed between an IDE drive and an SSD is a collateral benefit, but something that almost everyone can see.

https://www.askwoody.com/newsletter/does-an-old-personal-computer-become-useless/#hardware

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My oldest SSD is in my Dell Latitude E5420, replaced a Toshiba spinner in ~2006.  I have an mSATA 120GB SSD in my NAS for the OS which is ~eight years old.  My daily driver desktop has three Samsung M.2 NVMe 250GB SSD’s and three SATA 1GB SSD’s.  All are working very well.  All are trimmed on a weekly schedule.

And I have full drive images on all of them.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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My oldest SSD is a 32GB Transcend SSD I bought from Newegg back on 12/31/2010 which I now use as a spare “external” USB drive in a Startech housing and it’s still going strong!

I’ve experienced 2 bad SSD’s over the years, a 64GB Crucial (model CT64M225) bought in Jan 2014 and a 2 TB Mushkin (model MKNSSDRE2TB-TC) bought in July 2016 which were both DOA.

The sellers (Newegg & Platinum Micro) issued refunds for both SSD’s and I bought different makes to replace them (a 64GB SanDisk Ultra Plus and a 2 TB Samsung) and have had no further problems with either of them.

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This may also be of interest, from Backblaze:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-review/
:
In this report, we look at the failure rates of the SSDs that we use in our storage servers for 2022, for the last 3 years, and for the lifetime of the SSDs. In addition, we take our first look at the temperature of our SSDs for 2022, and we compare SSD and HDD temperatures to see if SSDs really do run cooler.

Overview

As of December 31, 2022, there were 2,906 SSDs being used as boot drives in our storage servers. There were 13 different models in use, most of which are considered consumer grade SSDs, and we’ll touch on why we use consumer grade SSDs a little later. In this report, we’ll show the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for these drive models over various periods of time, making observations and providing caveats to help interpret the data presented.

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Microfix, cyberSAR

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Thanks Sue!

One thing I found interesting is they didn’t have any Samsung SSDs.
I wonder why as I’ve had nothing but excellent results with them.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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SueW, cyberSAR, TechTango

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You’re welcome, RG!

Someone else asked a similar question in the comments under the article. According to Elliot Sims, from Backblaze:

They’re overkill for the pod boot drives since all those need is something to boot off, but we do use them for some other things. We don’t currently have good publishable drive stats on those, though. Partly because the stats collection is designed around the pods, partly because there aren’t very many of them compared to the number of pods, and partly because some of them are cache drives that get worn to failure well past their rated endurance.

Win 7 SP1 Home Premium 64-bit; Office 2010; Group B (SaS); Former 'Tech Weenie'

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RetiredGeek

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Having looked through the BackBlaze 2022 SSD report, I have to wonder why they have used so many Seagates, an SSD brand not on my list to buy.

I am comforted to know that I am not alone in identifying the inconsistency of SMART data among brands of SSDs.  BackBlaze sees this as an issue, too.

 

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I have the same number of SSD purchases as you, at nine (not including the ones that came with various laptops, which I have always removed for something larger at the time of purchase). My first purchase was also in 2012.

They are, in order of purchase:

Samsung 840 pro 128GB 2.5″
Sandisk Extreme II 120GB 2.5″
Samsung 850 Evo 1TB 2.5″
Samsung 860 Evo 1TB M.2 (SATA; From the Acer Swift 1; Lives on in a USB 3.x gen 1* SSK external enclosure)
Samsung 970 Evo 250GB M.2 (NVME Gen 3; From the Dell G3; lives on in another SSK external enclosure, USB 3.x gen 2*) 9.7TBW
SK Hynix M31 1TB M.2 (NVME Gen 3; In the Xenia 15) 58.8TBW
SK Hynix M31 2TB M.2 (NVME Gen 3; In the Xenia 15) 26.9TBW
SK Hynix M41 2TB M.2 (NVME Gen 4; Purchased for the Xenia 14 I returned; for now in a Thunderbolt 4 external enclosure) 34.1TBW
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB M.2 (NVME Gen 4; In the Dell XPS 13) 10.9TB W

None of them has failed, and all are in serviceable condition today. Some are semi-retired as the PCs they are used in have fallen into disuse. I still own all the SSDs above. They have often been used pretty heavily, especially the 840 Pro.

* The “x” in USB 3.x is pretty much meaningless. It’s the generation, often shorten to gen, of the USB 3.x port or device that matters. USB 3.0 is always Gen 1, while the others are supposed to specify the generation as part of the name. Whether it is USB 3.0, 3.1, or 3.2, you know that Gen 1 is 5 Mb/s; Gen 2 is 10Mb/s, Gen 3 Gen 2×2 is 20Mb/s.

If you see a port or device listed only as “USB 3.2,” you really have no way of knowing how fast it can go. It could be 5, 10, or 20 Mb/s. You will have to dig a little deeper to find out what spec that product actually supports. It would have made too much sense to have just named the new USB versions USB 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, respectively.

USB 4.0 is good for 40 Gb/s, like Thunderbolt 3 and 4.

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Actually, it’s even more complicated than that!

The speed you get also depends on whether it’s single or dual lane USB and whether you’re using a USB-A/B (single lane only) or USB-C (dual lane) cable.

USB 2.0 Slow Speed 1.5 Mbps
USB 2.0 Full Speed 12 Mbps
USB 2.0 High Speed 480 Mbps

USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 5 Gbps
(aka USB 3.0 & USB 3.1 Gen 1)

USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 10 Gbps **

USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 10 Gbps
(aka USB 3.1 Gen 2)

USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps **

USB 4.1 x2 40 Gbps **
USB 4.2 x2 80 Gbps **

** Dual-lane requires USB-C cable

There’s also “suppose” to be a standard color for each different type of USB port to make it easy to tell them apart.

However, the Asus motherboard in my desktop has 4 blue USB ports (they are definitively not teal) that are labeled as USB 3.1 Gen 1 instead of USB 3.0 in the manual and the USB ports on my Nephew’s new laptop (less than a year old) are all blue but the manual indicates they’re USB 3.2 Gen 2 which, according to the color standard, should be red.

So it “seems” manufacturers aren’t following the recommended USB colors.

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USB cables are also color coded. Do USB cables follow the same color conventions as USB ports?

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Yes, the USB connectors on the ends of the cables are “suppose” to follow the same standard.

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geekdom

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I have more than a slight tendency to go on a tangent and write a small novel’s worth of text. I wrote and rewrote that last bit (the footnote) several times, trying to make it at least shorter than the actual bit that was about SSDs. Looks like I missed the mark with gen 3 (should be gen 2×2).

Using the recommended colors won’t really mean much for the end user. If you saw a teal port, would you know if it was materially different from USB 3.0, or if it was the highest speed associated with USB 3.1 (10 Gb) or USB 3.2 (20 Gb)?

And as for red ports… my motherboard from 2012 has red USB ports on it that Asus used to denote as proprietary higher power versions of USB 3.0. It would be years before the PCI SIG defined red to be something else. Again, older stuff that still exists is a fly in the ointment, though in this case it was Asus making up their own stuff, which they presumably thought was safe since red was unused at the time.

Manufacturers aren’t universally following the naming conventions either. They’re often referring to ports by their “USB 3.x” revision without stating the “gen” part. That they would do this was completely predictable, of course, but perhaps not as obvious as the observation that older products and info would not change along with the changing definitions. A port labeled USB 3.0 will always say USB 3.0, and newer products with that same port should not carry a different name.

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I still have a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 from 2007 that works just fine. I don’t have it in anything as a daily driver though. I’ve been using SSDs ever since that and only one has given me trouble. That was a 1TB WD Blue SSD. It didn’t stop working, it just got really slow at reading resting data. Anything newly written was fine but older files were excruciating. I replaced it with a Samsung 970 Pro and restored from my backups.

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Got an OCZ Solid sata III SSD from circa 2012 STILL going strong as a secondary daily driver (different device used everyday) I actually think the build quality was better in earlier SSD’s and heavier, compared to newer Toshiba (OCZ) SSD’s that are light with a plasticized character (read bland). Maybe I just prefer better/ stronger/ heavier build quality (in anything) I’m not for cheaper mass produced plastication fabrication these days..YMMV
I tend to look after my IT hardware for a longevity point of view, now paying off

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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……. wrote:

Windows 7 hard drive failed 3 years after the extended warrenty ended. Bought another hard drive and failed after 1.6 years. Bought a third one and fine for now.

As mentioned in article on pcworld.com, hard drives after 2014 are less reliable and fail within 3 years. It seems that manufacturers use to cared about making a good product that lasted, but now they just care about the bottom line to make the most money they can.

A recent report about hard-disk drive reliability suggests that not only do most HDDs die within three years, but those produced after 2014 can be less reliable, too.

hdds-may-be-falling-and-failing-in-popularity-but-not-with-me

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The engineers at the hard drive manufacturers should know that there is a limit to how much storage capacity you can get out of iron oxide, even with chrome and other elements put in.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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Charlie wrote:

The engineers at the hard drive manufacturers should know that there is a limit to how much storage capacity you can get out of iron oxide

There are WD 22TB and 48TB HDDs.

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Hence the premature failures.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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Charlie wrote:

The engineers at the hard drive manufacturers should know that there is a limit to how much storage capacity you can get out of iron oxide, even with chrome and other elements put in.

Many manufactures and businesses use engineers to built built kill switches or time failure into products in the 1980 and 1990’s. They realized that if they made a product that lasted a long time, they would be losing money.

This is why the TV from 1960 still worked until 2010 and were taken out by DTV. Now you buy a TV in 2015 and it fails in 2-3 years.

1960 refrigerators still worked until 2014. You buy a refrigerator in 2014 and it fails in 2019. Less than 5-7 years. Rather than 50+ years like it was before.

1970 Dryers work until 2020. You buy it in 2020 and it fails in 2023. Might be the shortages but still, less than 3 years makes no sense.

1920 car still works fine. 1980 cars fail in 2000. 2000 cars fails in 2007. 2007 car fails in 2012. 2012 car fails in 2017. 2017 car fails in 2020. 2020 car still works but will be 3 years soon so the time kill switch will activate soon. EV cars will last less than 3 years since the battery will not last for more than 1 or 2 years.

People complain that the environment and trash is ruining the surrounding. But people have lost common sense and companies are just greedy money seeking now.

Back in the old days, I could buy a lot for 10¢.  Now people won’t pick a dime up off the ground since you can’t buy anything with it. I do pickup dimes and pennies as well. I could have been rich in the old days with the dimes and pennies from the ground that I find during my afternoon walks. Time for this old timer to go for a walk and look for coins…

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Charlie

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Old person with common sense wrote:

1920 car still works fine. 1980 cars fail in 2000. 2000 cars fails in 2007. 2007 car fails in 2012. 2012 car fails in 2017. 2017 car fails in 2020. 2020 car still works but will be 3 years soon so the time kill switch will activate soon.

Not true for all “modern” cars.

I’m still driving my 1998 Dodge Durango and, other than needing a new tranny at ~280K and a new transfer case at ~320K, only normal “wear items” have needed to be replaced and it’s still going strong at +348K!

When the engine finally dies, I’ll most likely get it replaced (should be ~$6000) instead of spending +$40,000 or more for something new, and just “keep on trucking!”

The trick to vehicle longevity, is performing regular maintenance on it; which most people never do. If you do, a vehicle can last a really long time before you must replace it.

FYI, my particular vehicle disproves the old adage, “If it was made on a Monday, I’ll be a lemon.” According to the door tag, it left the factory on March 30, 1998 (which was a Monday) and turned 25 this past Thursday!

BTW, I also pick up dimes and pennies!

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z-quirp, Charlie, SueW

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I once had a great little car that I bought mainly to commute to work. It was a 1997 Hyundai Accent GT and my wife and I both loved it. I had all the routine maintenance done on schedule and after 15 years that car was still running like a top.

Then one day the “Check Engine” light came on. The OBD code said there was a vacuum leak, most likely in the intake manifold. I drove it for a few months with the check engine light on with absolutely no problems, and it actually seemed to run better.

Figuring I’d eventually have to get it fixed to pass the emission test, I took it to my mechanic to fix the leak. When I got the car back it didn’t run anywhere near like before and had no pep like before. After that, other things started going wrong with it so I decided to trade it in on the 2012 Scion TC. I think that MTBF you find on HDD’s applies to cars too and is built in by the manufacturer.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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My 2014 Toyota Avalon is still going strong! Regular maintenance.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Pcworld Article wrote:

It seems that manufacturers use to cared about making a good product that lasted, but now they just care about the bottom line to make the most money they can.

This is so true now a days. In my young age, things lasted longer than they do now.

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Alex5723

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“Things” now cost a fraction of the price they used to cost – if they even existed – and this allows us to buy more “things”, some of which may be of lesser quality.
Having more “things” means we will find some that fail before we hope, but I suspect we just like new “things” and replace them much earlier.

I’ll stick to having lots of affordable “things” and put up with the occasional failure.

cheers, Paul

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[Charlie]

Paul T wrote:

I’ll stick to having lots of affordable “things” and put up with the occasional failure.

In 1969 I bought a new V8 Mustang for a little over $3,100; today a V8 Mustang costs over $38,000 – almost 13 times more.  And so it goes for housing, clothing, tools, food, toiletries, gasoline, motor oil, car parts, car repairs, and pretty much everything else except for some electronic things like computers.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by Charlie.

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Yet I can fly around the globe for the same number of dollars as I could 30 years ago.
And I get paid a lot more than I did 30 years ago.

Nostalgia is just fond memories, not a reflection of reality.

cheers, Paul

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Out of respect for this website and its rules I won’t go into detail about how the Federal Reserve is ruining my retirement in its “fight against inflation”.  That’s my reality now.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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Hey y’all,

We’re getting a bit off topic of SSD Longevity. Let’s please stick with the topic.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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