How long do SSD's actually last?

[LudwigZildjian]

Hello, I am looking at getting a Samsung SSD soon, and I see they offer a warranty up to 5 years for the 840 EVO and 10 years for the 850 Pro. I'm wondering how long they stay alive? I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro and I use Photoshop, Office, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro X, and Ableton Live. I'm a musician.... Thanks.

 

[SproutSchon]

Much longer than expected!
Please have a look to this article: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes
They have performed very extensive endurance tests.
For example the 840Pro died after 1.2PB of data written on it, lower-end SSDs died after at least 700TB of data written on them.

 

[i7Baby]

There are essentially two types of SSDs: SLC (single-layer cell) and MLC (multi-layer cell). SLC lasts longer and is far more expensive. You could expect an SLC drive to last a lifetime. The enthusiast market is pretty much entirely MLC drives. An optimistic estimate for the lifespan of an MLC drive would be ten years.

 

[hang-the-9]

From what I've seen, they last as much as the normal lifespan of a regular drive and maybe more as there are less parts to fail (no spinning disk or arm waving around all the time).

We have quite a few older 128GB drives from 2010 and I have only seen one bad drive out of the dozens I worked with, rest are running just fine after 4 years.