Every digital storage device has drawbacks, and while SSDs are reliable, they can still lose data under certain circumstances. In fact, all SSDs have an expiration date — but figuring out that expiration date requires some complicated math.
The more you use your SSD, the less reliable it becomes. The good news: Wear leveling and other technologies have dramatically increased the expected operating lifespans of flash devices.
So, how long can you use an SSD before considering a replacement? While product warranties aren’t a great way to measure actual operating lifespan, they do provide some insight for SSD reliability. SSD manufacturers list total terabytes written (TBW) in their warranties, along with a traditional timeframe; if the user writes a tremendous amount of data to a solid-state drive, their warranty will expire.
The Samsung 850 EVO, for instance, has a limited warranty of 5 years or up to 300 TBW. The data warranty policy changes depending on the size of the drive, so larger drives usually have a longer TBW period. You’ll need to determine how much data you write on an everyday basis to make a reasonable estimate regarding lifespan; if you’re using your SSD as a media drive, for instance, it’s likely to hit its rated TBW fairly quickly, but if you don’t regularly write much data to the device, it may last longer.
This doesn’t mean that a Samsung SSD will immediately fail after surpassing 300 TBW. Many drives last for much, much longer, but generally, SSDs will begin encountering issues after about 5 years of typical use.