You might already suspect that Solid State Drives (SSDs) have a somewhat limited lifespan, depending on the amount of data stored on each unit. In some cases, they can last for many years. One myth that still makes consumers hesitant to buy SSDs is the belief that these drives have a short lifespan due to the nature of flash memory, which has limited write cycles. But… is that really true? Check out the full article for more details! 😉
Let’s get straight to the point: this is not true. Even if you are a more advanced user, an SSD will continue to function for many years. To prove this statement, the portal “The Tech Report” conducted a durability test with precise performance figures.
Five models were analyzed in the test: Corsair Neutron GTX, Kingston HyperX 3K, Samsung 840, Samsung 840 Pro, and Intel 335 Series, all with capacities of 240 GB or 256 GB. The test involved writing data sequentially to the drive until the unit failed. The two SSDs that performed best were the Kingston HyperX 3K and Samsung 840 Pro: they easily surpassed 2 Petabytes (2,000 TB) of written data before starting to fail.
For the best SSDs, which exceed 2 PB of written data, consider this: if you have an extremely intense usage pattern and manage to write and delete 256 GB of data per day, the unit would still function for 8,192 days, or approximately 22 years. With that in mind, don’t worry about “wearing out” your SSD—it’s very likely you’ll have upgraded your hardware long before 2037.
For the other models, performance was relatively acceptable. For example:
- Corsair Neutron GTX (1.2 PB)
- Samsung 840 (900 TB)
- Intel 335 Series (700 TB)
To put this into perspective, Intel estimates the lifespan of its drive at 3 years with an average of 20 GB of written data per day, which would result in just 22 TB of total written data—only 3% of what the SSD was actually capable of handling.
And you, what do you think of this practical insight?
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Photo by Andrey Matveev
