How long will my SSD last? Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com. It's interesting,
this is something that has changed fairly dramatically over all, say,
the last five or ten years. We used to be very, very frightened of using SSD's too much
because they have a limited lifespan. Flash memory that's used in both SSD and in USB thumb drives
wears out the more you write to it. As it turns out, however, the flash memory that is used for SSD
at least recently, turns out to have a surprisingly
long lifespan before it dies. And there are techniques you can use to determine exactly where you
are in its expected lifespan. Let me show you what those
are and how they go. Now, the thing to download, is
a program called CrystalDiskInfo. It's a utility that will give you a lot
of information actually about any of the disks on your system.
We'llwill be looking specifically at the SSD. But if you want to dive into some of the nitty gritty details about the rest
of your drives, by all means, you can use that as well
when you fire up CrystalDiskInfo. And I'm going to go ahead and bring a full
screen here, the CrystalDiskInfo on one of my SSD Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB. What you're looking at is
the default screen. When I look at that drive in CrystalDiskInfo the number we care about
is called total host writes. And you can see there that it's done 18,572 two gigabytes worth of writes. What does that mean?
Well, if we take a look at the specification
sheet for that drive and I'm not going to bring that up,
but you can for the drive you have, you will need to go and find
the specification sheet. The thing to look for is, in fact, what
CrystalDiskInfo is showing you here. Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB. If that's your SSD. That's the string that I searched
for and I found the spec sheet for my drive
on that spec sheet is a little piece of information called TBW Terabytes
written or terabytes writable. You can see that it has a warranty
of six hundred terabytes. What does that mean? Well, that means that Samsung, the manufacturer in this case,
will warranty this drive to operate for at least six hundred terabytes
of data being written to it. If that fails before in this case five
years or six hundred terabytes is written to the drive, then they'll
replace the drive. Where am I on that scale? Well, what we just saw in CrystalDiskInfo
is I'm at 18,572 gigabytes or
about 18 and a half terabytes. So I'm still way, way early
in this drive's expected life. And I've had it for just about two years. This, for me represents about
two years worth of usage. So if we do the math six hundred over 18,
then it's going to last for me a very long time, longer, I suspect,
than the machine is itself is going to either last or be useful as
technology continues to advance. So what this tells me is that my usage
of this drive, that this C drive is actually pretty reasonable and is
probably going to last a long time. Now I have two SSDs in this machine. Let's look at the other one. This is a Crucial CT2000P5SSD8 2TB. All that really translates to if you were to Google that specific number,
is it a two terabyte drive sold by Crucial one of the good drive
manufacturers and drive resellers. Here you can see that my total host writes
has been 3572 gigabytes or about
three and a half terabytes. What's the warranty for this drive? Well, if we take a look at what I found on its spec sheet, which was a little
hard to find, they claim twelve hundred. TBW, what that means is that I'm
nowhere near the lifespan of this drive. This drive is going to last me a really long time, again,
depending on how I use it. Interestingly, as I record this video, the video itself is being
written to that drive. The editing that I do is
being done on that drive. So it's actually a pretty good drive and it's going to last
me for a very long time. Now, I do have to make a
an important point here. There are no guarantees in life. A warranty is not a guarantee. This does not say we absolutely, positively guarantee that this
drive will not fail. What it says is the manufacturer has
enough faith in the quality of this drive, that if it fails prior to the warranty
having run out by either time or TBW, they'll replace the drive or refund
your money, whatever makes sense. The drive still could fail. It's just that the probability of the drive failing is very, very low,
low enough to make the manufacturer comfortable offering
that kind of a warranty. But it could still fail. What does that mean for you? Well, let's look at it another way. A warranty won't recover your data. In this small risk of that drive, failing, if it fails on you,
your data is gone. A warranty is not going to bring your data back, a new drive is going to come back
empty, a replacement or a refund of your money is not going to refund
or replace your data. Backups, you still need to do backups,
a good long lasting drive with a very high life expectancy is not
an excuse for not backing up. You still must backup
because it still could fail. The only thing the warranty is really
doing is protecting your wallet. You're not going to be out the couple
of hundred bucks or however many dollars your SSD turned out to be
if it fails earlier than the warranty. Enjoy the SSD. They're awesome, they're fast,
if you're curious, use a tool like CrystalDiskInfo to find out just where you are
on that disc's lifespan, but never, ever use any of that
information as an excuse not to back up. I hope this was helpful.
I hope this was interesting for updates. For links to related
articles, for comments. For more, visit Askleo.com/133201. I'm Leo Notenboom. This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.
