Lifespan on SSD

[Seetop]

So I recently built a new gaming rig and thought that I was buying the SSD for OS/Games. Come to find out that games take up a little more room than I had planned. I am contemplating purchasing another 120G ssd for use of Games only but was recently told that the constant write/rewrite of gaming would cause the SSD to fail prematurely. Just looking for any feedback on this issue to help with my decision. Thanks in advance.

Seetop

 

[kitsunestarwind]

Windows does far more writes then any game ever will do
My old windows SSD (64gb with only 9% life left according to crystaldiskinfo) has not had anymore wear put on it since becoming my current games drive.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

I can't speak for other companies drives but on the Intel® SSD 320's and 520's you are looking at being able to write 20GB a day every day for 5 years before you would run into problems.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/ssd-320-specification.html

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/ssd-520-specification.html


Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[WyomingKnott]

In my humble and untested opinion, most SSDs will outlast the systems in which they are installed. Many of us replace systems every few years as new generations of hardware roll in. And when the time comes to build a new one, the SSD that you have now will be several generations old; of course you will want a new one.

 

[CaedenV]

There is an effect known as 'hammering' which will kill your SSD very quickly. Hammering is when your are constantly writing and rewriting on your drive all of the time without any down time for garbage collection to do it's thing (using an SSD as a write cache for example... on something that writes constantly 24/7, or as a render drive, or as some other form of temp storage that is often replaced).

But after programs are installed they generally do not write much to the disc. Windows has updates, and registry changes, virtual memory (which you can safely turn off if you have 6GB or more of ram) and a few other little things here and there. Games have the occasional update, and then your save file, both of which are insignificant. Web browsers are constantly writing to your HDD, with all of the video streaming and flash games it is easy to do 1-2TB of web content a month through your web browser cache (and that's just with legal stuff 😛 ), so if you were going to be concerned, then worry on that front.
In general though, what everyone here is saying is true, unless you pick up a defective drive, your SSD should last just as long as a traditional HDD for most uses. If you are really paranoid then disable your virtual memory, move bulk files (like audio, and video) to a traditional HDD, and never use more than 80% of the drive at any one time (same goes for HDDs, but for different reasons). As always, keep backups of your important documents on more than one type of media because drive failures are simply a part of life, but you should not need to be any more afraid of your SSD dying on you than a normal HDD. Even SSDs known for having issues (like previous gen OCZ drives) worked perfectly fine from a hardware perspective, it was the firmware that was unstable, and now with updated firmware even those old SSDs work just fine.