What's so bad about running a lot of benchmark tests on a SSD?

[sltech]

I was running CrystalDiskMark on a couple of SSD drives. Both the exact same drive, but one seemed a little slower than the other for some reason. I probably ran the CDM benchmark about 30 times on each SSD.

Now I've seen some posts where people say you shouldn't run a lot of SSD benchmarks - maybe just run it once. Why is that? Did I just cut the lifespan of my SSDs in half or something by running CDM so many times?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Nah, not a big deal.

An SSD has a lifetime write rating of some number of dozens or hundreds of TB. Most of those mini-benchmarking utilities write between 1 and 10 GB of data to the drive. As a % of the overall expected lifespan of the drive, it's trivial. But at the same time, it'd be silly - and yes, a little wasteful - to benchmark it if you didn't need to.

Most SSDs can exceed that rating by a significant margin (many many times) but the manufacturers are playing it safe, and intentionally lowballing some ratings to segment their market and steer enterprise/business customers to more expensive pro-grade drives.

Most of what you're reading is psychology. Because SSDs wear out in a way that HDDs don't/didn't some people got really scared, and there's a lot of pearl-clutching out there written by people who think you have to treat an SSD like some kind of delicate flower or else. Thing is, HDDs wear out too - the old saying goes, "If you've never experienced data loss, congratulations - YOU WILL." But they don't have a built-in wear-gauge like SSDs, so most people ignore their impending demise. (And then get all surprised and outraged when they have an HDD failure.)

 

[nerp]

Most consumers should never experience wearing out an SSD through normal use. They burn out in a busy datacenter, maybe, where the entire thing is written over thousands and thousands of times.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Most consumers should never experience wearing out an SSD through normal use. They burn out in a busy datacenter, maybe, where the entire thing is written over thousands and thousands of times.

That's one reason why they rate server-oriented SSDs, in DWPD - drive writes per day. As in, re-writing the entire drive multiple times a day.