How reliable is the remaining lifetime of an SSD?
Jan 22
I've had HDDs years ago that used to fail and Windows would warn me that HDD has serious problem and gave me time to do something about it, because otherwise after I reboot, it wasn't guaranteed for HDD to work again. That's like 10+ years ago.
I've had an SSD for the past 6+ years and I've been using it nonstop. It's a 256 GB SSD and I've written over 170 terabytes on it so far. In Windows disk and drives settings, I see it has still 54% of its lifetime remaining, which is amazing.
I want to know how reliable is this life time number exactly? I know that Windows setting uses S.M.A.R.T data to estimate the remaining life time, but are SSDs like HDDs and do they fail all of sudden just because of a bad sector or something like that? Or do they degrade over time gradually? I check that remaining life time every few months and it does go down 1% some times.
What to do about a critical warning for a storage device
More details for my SSD:
TBW for my SSD is 160 TB, but I've already written 170 TB and SMART shows 54% life time remaining. it's been almost always running at ~50.C temp.
1 answer
Accepted answer · original discussion
Jan 22
You can never know when one specific drive is going to fail, or whether it will fail slowly enough to rescue data from, or fail suddenly and catastrophically.
SMART is a set of 'guesswork' algorithms, in effect. It can be a reliable predictor of slow decline, but it can never predict sudden total failure.
You always need a backup in place, and you need to periodically test it works. Waiting for the warning is just not reliable. This becomes even more important if a drive is encrypted, as any fail may take down the encryption keys, meaning the data is lost immediately & totally.
My oldest SSD is now about 10 years old. It still shows '100% health' when I look at the figures. I have two independent apps which background check the SMART data every few hours.
So far, so good.
My in-house backup runs every hour, my off-site overnight each night. I also make periodic direct clones.
One day the drive will fail. At that point I will order a new one & be back up & running, with no more than an hour's work lost, within half an hour of the new drive arriving.
I once had, due to total coincidence, two boot drives on two machines fail inside a few months. Both drives were relatively new, both from reliable manufacturers.
Nothing was lost in either case.
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