Endurance of Sata SSDs and how long they usually last

[rafin2000]

Do SSDs consider the amount of data written as well as data read from the drive when calculating the amount of TBW used?
How long would a 1tb 600TWB ssd last if it was used as the only storage device in a system?
it'll primarily be used for playing online/offline AAA video games, watching HD movies, coding, internet browsing & all the typical stuff. Thanks in advance.

 

[geofelt]

The limit is dependent on the number of writes; reads are infinite.

As a practical matter a 1tb ssd has unlimited endurance.
Even with very heavy daily server type use, there are so many nand blocks on a 1tb ssd to make it last a very long time.
Think 15 years or more.
The device will be long obsolete before you run out of endurance.

And... even if you should exhaust the update capability, the device will still be readable allowing you to copy it to a replacement device.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Reads do not wear the SSD. Only writes do that.

As for how long it will last, in most cases, with modern SSDs, longer than you are probably going to have that system. Unless you do a LOT of VERY large writes, like copying your entire collection of game files to the drive, often, it will probably outlast most of the other hardware in the build.

Most people will probably use their SSD in more than one build, but really it just matters what your particular tendencies are. There is no "it will last this long" because what you write on a daily basis and what I write on a daily basis are almost assuredly not the same.

 

[Solandri]

I used a laptop with a 256GB SSD for my security camera system. About 120 GB of writes per day for 2 years, so about 85 TB of writes total. I had to replace the laptop because the battery began bulging from the heat (running the i7 quad core at 70%-100% for 24/7 encoding video).

The SSD was (and is) still working just fine, which isn't surprising since even at that high write rate, it only worked out to 340 write cycles per NAND cell, and these things are rated at several thousand write cycles per cell (about 1000 for TLC NAND). Unless you're going to use the SSD to store high-frequency database transactions, any modern capacity SSD will be obsolete long before you wear it out.

 

[USAFRet]

Out of 10 SATA SSD's distributed among my house systems, the only one that is showing any signs of age is a 6+ year old Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB. First stood up as the OS drive in summer 2012. Since relegated to secondary duty, mostly due to size.

Reads are still at original speed, write speed has decreased.

All the others, Samsung and Sandisk, are still at original out of the box performance.
Total TBW among ALL these drives? ~85TBW. And these systems are all SSD only. So no fudging with them trying to be "only the OS!"

A 1TB drive? 600TBW warranty number?
After you've moved this drive from this PC, into the next two...you'll be wondering when it might start to slow down. A decade from now.

Buy a good quality drive, use it, and just don't fill it up too much.

 

[martinch]

Do SSDs consider the amount of data written as well as data read from the drive when calculating the amount of TBW used?[/quotems]
TBW means "total bytes written, so no, reads do not count.

How long would a 1tb 600TWB ssd last if it was used as the only storage device in a system?

Ages. My 3 year old work laptop has a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB in it. It's used for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, and is used to do lots of compiling, etc, which means lots of small writes. It's currently up to 30TB written (total).

 

[Darkbreeze]

I just retired my 850 EVO that has been in my desktop for four years as the primary OS drive. It was used HEAVILY. Currently, Samsung magician shows it having the same performance it had when it was new and condition still Good. I replaced it with a 970 EVO, and the 850 EVO is now going to do duty as the target drive for system backups. I expect I'll probably get about another five years out of it writing the full 80GB of OS data to it repeatedly three times per week.