cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/5332699
I have an SSD that's around 5 years old now. It used to be in my laptop. But then I upgraded my laptop and put it in a homeserver. It still works perfectly well but from what I've read, SSDs fail suddenly without much prior indications.
Do you think I should replace it already? It's not running any super important stuff. If it dies, it'll just mean that my media servers will be down for a day, not a super big deal since I have regular backups. I feel bad creating unnecessary e-waste, so I'll love to know your experience with SSDs and how frequently do you usually replace them.
Also, if you know a tool which can help me detect remaining lifespan of an SSD, that'll be very helpful. Thanks.
You can track the health status of most smart enabled ssds. Can use a tool like crystal disk info
Personally i have 2 7 year old ssds going strong without issue. Mainly used for storage and games, so the r/w rates been pretty lower on them.
Ssds do have a total maximum write cycles to nand. Really depends on the use cases over the 5 years.
Not always does Crystal disk completely shine through the disk.
Had a sandisk 512GB SSD which was completely fine.
One day it suddenly became very slow with read and write performance. It was in the <20mb/s range amd painful to recover data from.
CrystalDisk said everything is fine. Health = Good.
Regarding the write cycles: If they ar used up the cells should enter a read only mode so that you should be able to recover the data from. Bad time if it's the OS though.
This has never happened to me, but I suspect it's because the controller is the primary failure point here.
Agreed, i mainly mention Crystaldisk because its a quick free tool. Definitely reccomend using multiple avenues of info gathering to determine hardware health.
Just saying so other less technical users don't take the statement as a one stop tool and don't act on it.
@User with an issue: If the SSD behaves abnormaly than usual, back it up asap and replace it.
They've not been used too much, I think. My laptop had very typical laptop usage: browsing, reading docs, coding, nothing storage intensive. On the server, the most intensive usage is for PhotoPrism and Jellyfin, and I don't think that's anything out of the usual.
Id say they are most likely in good health. But anything could happen. Always reccomend having a backup option in place.
many older ssd are actually better in terms of longevity because slc and mlc typically have/had higher endurance than newer tlc and (especially) qlc.