So the answer is definitive when it comes to SSD endurance: you have nothing to worry about unless you’re running some kind of unrealistic torture test. If you need further proof and you’re running Windows, you can track for yourself the amount of data being written to your solid state drive.
Image by Laineema / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0
All you need to do is fire up Windows’ built-in Performance Monitor by going to the Start Menu and typing “Performance Monitor” in the search box. Once it’s up, you’ll find there are quite a few metrics you can track, however, as as gHacks’ Martin Brinkmann explains, the ones you want are under the “PhysicalDisk” category.
If you leave it running for a few minutes, you’ll quickly get an idea of regular usage, though you’ll want to run it longer for more representative values. It’ll look something like this:
Brinkmann crunched the numbers on his own data (not what you see above) and came to the following conclusion:
All values are displayed in bytes per second so divide the value by 1000 to get a rough conversion to Kilobyte (to be precise, divide it by 1024) to get Kilobytes, by 1,048576 to get Megabytes and by 1073741824 to get Gigabytes). The average usage above is about 20 Kilobyte per second which is 1728000 Kilobyte per day if the computer is running 24 hours per day. Divide that by 1000 and you get roughly 1700 Megabyte per day of usage.
He goes on to say that using The Tech Report’s worst-case number of 600TB for its year-long tests, his drive should last 352,941 days… or almost 1000 years.
Yep, I think we’re good!
Comments
4 responses to “Find Out How Long Your SSD Will Last Based On Your Average Usage”
In other words, it’ll out last a hard disk by many human lifetimes.
The better way is to look at the SMART readings from the drive. You can see the number of power on hours, and the number of lifetime LBA writes, and do the maths from there.
(LBA Writes * 512) / hours = Bytes per hour. This is easily boiled down to Gb per day.
Personally, my 840 Evo cops ~3Gb per hour of use. Using the worst case 600TB failure point, this gives me ~7 Years before drive failure.
Or run SSD Life and it will just tell you right away.
My experience with SSD’s is that they shit themselves about every 2 years!