How long, on average, does an SSD last?

[Rafael Mestdag]

I've just bought a 120GB Kingston A400 SSD drive and I'd like to know how long a drive like this lasts.

Thx in advance!

 

[rhysiam]

I've just bought a 120GB Kingston A400 SSD drive and I'd like to know how long a drive like this lasts.

Thx in advance!

In all likelihood it will end up being put in a cupboard while it's still working just fine, but no longer large enough or fast enough to be of practical use to you or anyone else.

While SSDs, like any electrical device, can fail, it's rare and you'd be unlucky.

While the flash storage in SSDs do sustain a limited number of writes which can, theoretically, mean they fail under heavy use, the chances of you reaching those thresholds with a normal drive under normal desktop conditions is extremely small.

Unless you're unlucky, that drive will probably still be working just fine in 5-10 years, at which point you'll have little use for it anyway.

 

[USAFRet]

I've just bought a 120GB Kingston A400 SSD drive and I'd like to know how long a drive like this lasts.

Thx in advance!

My 120GB Kingston will be 5 years old in a couple of months.
Almost constant use. It has been relegated to secondary duty, simply because it is too small.

Also, read here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/samsung-ssd-840-evo-review-120gb-250gb-500gb-750gb-1tb-models-tested/3
http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb

That drive will be obsolete due to size long before it wears out.
Of course, with any bit of electronics, things happen.
But it won't 'wear out' just because it is an SSD.

 

[Solandri]

The paranoia over SSDs wearing out dates back to when the typical SSD size was about 16 GB. So the writes would hit each NAND cell much more frequently than with modern, larger drives.

Unless you're a business doing high-frequency database writes to the SSD, you've got nothing to worry about. I put a cheap 240 GB SSD in a security camera computer and used it for the initial recording (archived once a day to a 4TB HDD). We had 8 cameras so I was worried a HDD wouldn't be able to keep up. 80-100 GB of writes every day for 2 years, no problems. The most pessimistic estimate of endurance (the earliest drive to die in the techreport test) worked out to 3 years of use, so expect it to last for years if not decades.