[SOLVED] SSD wear and cloud backup

[altitune]

I have an Intel 530 SSD installed July 2013, and am using Carbonite as cloud backup.

1st question: Am I correct in my assumption that Carbonite, and all other cloud-based backup solutions, wears on SSD's with frequent reading/writing operations?

I'm a home user, and the Intel SSD Toolbox says that my SSD has 100% drive health and 90 % estimated life remaining.

2nd question: At what estimated life remaining percentage should I start thinking about change to a new SSD without beeing overly paranoid?

 

[Encryption+]

SSD's usually last about five years. Some might last a little longer but five years is pretty much average.

 

[cryoburner]

Only writing to the drive should cause wear on its flash memory. So unless your drive is constantly downloading and writing the backed-up data back to the drive, I don't see there being a problem. I don't know about that software in particular, but generally backups will be primarily just be reading data from the drive to write elsewhere, and that shouldn't significantly affect the life of the drive.

2nd question: At what estimated life remaining percentage should I start thinking about change to a new SSD without beeing overly paranoid?

Perhaps 0%? : P Again, that "life-remaining" metric is referring to estimated writes remaining to the drive's flash memory. I'm not sure about that exact drive, though I know Intel has tended to put their drives into a read-only state when they hit 0%, with the data still accessible. Other drives may continue to run fine long after hitting 0%. Of course, there's the possibility of a drive failing at any time due to reasons other than wear on the flash memory, so you shouldn't expect any drive to be 100% reliable, even if its brand new.

SSD's usually last about five years. Some might last a little longer but five years is pretty much average.

This doesn't sound accurate. Especially since SSDs haven't really been in somewhat common use for much longer than that, so it would be impossible to determine any meaningful average from currently available data. The drives might have 3-5 year warranties, but that's just how long the manufacturer is willing to replace them for. In practice, I suspect most SSDs should last far longer than that, so long as one isn't constantly writing an abnormal amount of data to them. As far as the flash degradation goes, again, its dependent on writes, but under a "typical" usage scenario the flash in most of these drives could last for decades. Other components in the drive might fail before then (like a capacitor for example), but I would expect typical long-term durability to be better than something like a motherboard. Which again, could be decades. SSDs haven't been in regular use long enough to say for sure though.

 

[popatim]

You'll usually need a bigger drive long before you need to replace it due to writes wearing it out these days.

 

[USAFRet]

SSD's usually last about five years. Some might last a little longer but five years is pretty much average.

Have any reference for this "5 years"?
2 of mine were installed Nov-Dec 2014, and still report 100%, and give basically original performance.

 

[altitune]

Only writing to the drive should cause wear on its flash memory. So unless your drive is constantly downloading and writing the backed-up data back to the drive, I don't see there being a problem. I don't know about that software in particular, but generally backups will be primarily just be reading data from the drive to write elsewhere, and that shouldn't significantly affect the life of the drive.

I'm not running any heavy programs like video editing, just Word, Acrobat and Photoshop at a regular basis. Still SMART reports the following:

09, Power-On Hours Count, 3493.

E1, Host Writes, 51444.34 GB (14.73 GB/hour).

E9, Media Wearout Indicator, 93.

F1, Total LBAs Written, 51444.34 GB (14.73 GB/hour).

F2, Total LBAs Read, 216463.75 GB (61.97 GB/hour).

F9, Total NAND Writes, 70392.00 GB (20.15 GB/hour).

I guess it is the endless selection of files to back up and then sending them to the Cloud. Or are those operations performed solely in the RAM without affecting the SSD?