SSD life span.....

[silicon]

I am accustomed to a mechanical drive with a certain life span but what is a typical lifespan of an SSD drive? Is it a case where it will no longer read/write to the memory cells?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

The cells eventually give up, but the life span is apparently longer than many had feared for the most recent generations. I don't have the link, but there have been some online torture tests where SSDs were brutalized and kept on chugging.

For what it's worth, my 3 year old Intel SSD has had 4,771 GB of writes and the Intel Toolbox says it has 99% of its lifespan left--not that I put much stock in that computation. It's well under half full, so I'm wondering if I'd ever replace it.

They can drop dead like anything else, but as far as I can see, that's less likely to happen than with mechanical drives.

 

[Anteaus]

If you buy an SSD, it is more likely to fail for any number of reasons before you would hit it's service life. The good news is that recent SSDs are more reliable than earlier models.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I've had both spinners and ssd's die on me so in my eyes I'll settle for the ssd speed and use the warranty if I have to. I'm contemplating replacing my 600gb vraptor programs drive with a Samsung evo 750 or 1tb drive. If I had the cash I'd go spinnerless in a heartbeat.

 

[ctk1981]

I'll probably jinx myself on this one, but I have yet to have a SSD fail. OCZ Vertex, OCZ Summit, An intel ssd (from around same time, cant remember model sold to a friend), Samsung 830 and now a Samsung 840 pro (bought used).

The OCZ vertex was especially a pain at the time....firmware flash after firmware flash of updates. They originally did not support trim, then supported a proprietary program to enable trim, to finally support trim native in windows. And most of the flashes were of the destructive nature.