How much longer should I keep my C drive? (pics)

I've had this C drive since 2019. I use my hard drives for all my media and photography, other SSDs for my games and Lightroom catalog and cache. My C drive is for boot and my applications. There is not much reading and writing other than the normal Windows processes and my daily usage of apps. I honestly don't know how it has so many writes, other than my normal usage about 4 days a week. How have I written 174 terabytes to it?

I wonder how CrystalDiskInfo is determining 23% good?

The 512 Silicon Power M.2 drives I found have a spec'd TBW of 300TB. 174TB would suggest that you have 42% remaining.

44746 hours is more than 5 years. You rarely turn the machine off?

bobkn said:

I wonder how CrystalDiskInfo is determining 23% good?

The 512 Silicon Power M.2 drives I found have a spec'd TBW of 300TB. 174TB would suggest that you have 42% remaining.

44746 hours is more than 5 years. You rarely turn the machine off?

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I'm sorry it took me 2 weeks to reply, I had forgotten I posted this. I built my PC in 2019 and I have used it an average of 4 days a week since then. I believe the number simply because I have used it that often. I often keep it running overnight because I do 2 cloud backups and a Synology backup every night.

If the drive is going then I have no problem getting a new one and popping open my PC to replace it. The C drive has nothing that can't be easily replaced. I just hate losing a day of productivity and I know I'll have to remove my GPU and that has been giving me problems that I actually came on here today to ask about.

How often do you trim? If you do not, Windows writes to the space over and over, thus wearing off the disk needlessly.

Thready said:

How have I written 174 terabytes to it?

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Thready said:

I often keep it running overnight because I do 2 cloud backups and a Synology backup every night.

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System Imaging uses compression, thus it can write the image 2-3 times on the disk.
You can use System Informer to monitor disk writes which helps to prolong SSD's life.

Thready said:

How have I written 174 terabytes to it?

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Your pagefile.

I think too many worry about things not needing worrying about. The drive reports as good, and doesn't appear to be full so I say if there are no other issues there's nothing to worry about.

I do zero interventions on my disks and just let Windows handle the drives as needed. Never once did I ever run into an issue where the drive needed to be replaced due to improper wear. I also leave Windows trim and other HD /SSD/NVMe utilities to do their own thing as I worry about more important things... is the next Windows Update going to break my PC.

All that said, I'm more on a time change schedule for certain devices in my system with drives being one of them - If a drive has been running in my system for 5-7 years, I replace. Those drives are than used in a backup system until they are replaced. That's me.

At the end of the day, if you're not having issues, there's no need to worry over it.

DJNelson said:

Your pagefile.

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Such an obsolete feature in NVMe days, just like superfetch or indexing, yet still heavily used.
My 6 years old 512GB SSD has 88%, because I have limited writes as much as possible. I trim weekly.

Unfortunately, even 32GB RAM isn't enough to run windows without a pagefile when editing video or some other compression/decompression operation. I've seen Virtual Memory reach 56GB when converting a 4k RAW video to 1080p

The 930 GB drive (689 GB used) on my HP laptop, from before 2019, is still running fine. My Windows 10 desktop, which was from long before the laptop, also has hard drives that still work fine. I also have an old SubNote laptop with Windows 3.1 on it. The battery and charging circuits have burned out, but it still works from a external power supply. It has a 40 MB hard drive that just keeps on working. I even had a external 3-1/2" floppy adapter for it.

There is no telling when a drive may start picking up errors and go bad. Just keep a current backup.

I would change the SSD right away. It has been heavily used, for whatever reason, and Silicon Power SSDs are typically low-cost, not very high quality. Put it in an enclosure and use it for other purposes.

bobkn said:

I wonder how CrystalDiskInfo is determining 23% good?

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SMART Percentage Used 0x4D = 77 decimal. So 77% of erase cycles used. It is good until it hits 0%. So only 23% of its erase cycles are left.

At the rate the OP is going, of using 12.8%/year, there is about 1.8 years of use left.

TairikuOkami said:

Such an obsolete feature in NVMe days, just like superfetch or indexing, yet still heavily used.

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I disable search service which disables indexing.
I also untick what is highlighted in the attached in drive properties for SSD.
Windows by default will have it on even for SSD.

Anibor_11 said:

I would change the SSD right away. It has been heavily used, for whatever reason, and Silicon Power SSDs are typically low-cost, not very high quality. Put it in an enclosure and use it for other purposes.

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It is fine looking at all of the smart attributes. No errors, plenty of erase cycles left for 1.8 years of use. I would use it until "Available spares" (currently 100) reaches its threshold of 5 or "media and data integrity errors" is non-zero.

I agree with the advice to replace the SSD. Keep it for an emergency spare, as it's probably still good for a while, but it's been my experience that solid state electronics have a half-life of about 7 years, and deteriorate at an accelerating rate with age. There's no telling when its time is up.

I'd personally just make sure you're well backed up if you continue to use it. I'd personally probably replace it, but I'm the kind of guy that really doesn't like stuff crapping out in the middle of a job!

Hi @Thready

Download and install the trial version of Hard Disk Sentinel which you can use it free for as long as you want and monitor the health of of your System SSD periodically Hard Disk Sentinel Trial version - HDD health and temperature monitoring .
Screenshots showing the results of periodical checks on my System SSD below.







You are your own Master to determine when to replace your system SSD .

Thank you everybody for your help and advice. My strength is that I backup all important work in my life and I have tested my backups thoroughly, so I know if anything happens to my PC, I will be good to go to just change the C drive and reinstall Windows (I also don't put important stuff on the C drive).

I have decided I will wait until maybe November when I can afford 3 things, a new GPU, 64 GB RAM, and a 1 TB NVME at the same time because I hate opening my computer.

I didn't know Photo editing would use up my 32GB RAM so easily, but I do use 2 monitors at the same time with YouTube on the other.

Thanks all and I've bookmarked this page so I can come back to it.

jumanji said:

Hi @Thready

Download and install the trial version of Hard Disk Sentinel which you can use it free for as long as you want and monitor the health of of your System SSD periodically Hard Disk Sentinel Trial version - HDD health and temperature monitoring .
Screenshots showing the results of periodical checks on my System SSD below.

View attachment 145229

View attachment 145230

View attachment 145240

You are your own Master to determine when to replace your system SSD .

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I have saved these pictures to my computer. Thank you for being thorough enough for me to understand. I don't know what the words Threshold, Value, and Worst mean when it comes to storage drives. I assume value means its state right now and worst means the worst state it has ever been in. It's confusing when I look it up too. Is there an easy way to understand what they mean?

Components of a SMART attribute:

Identifier: A number that defines the attribute, such as 5 for reallocated sectors or 194 for temperature.or 202 for Percentage of Rated Lifetime Used

Data (Raw): The raw, measured value from a sensor or counter, like a temperature reading or a count of errors.

Threshold: The failure limit for that attribute, set by the drive manufacturer.

Value: The current relative "health" of the attribute, calculated by the manufacturer's algorithm from the raw data.

Worst: The smallest (worst) "Value" ever recorded in the drive's lifetime.

To know more about to SMART attributes, you may google "SMART attributes explained " "SMART attributes for SSD" "SMART attributes list" etc. ( You will almost certainly give up )

Note 1: For a normal user, it wil be difficult to understand what various attributes mean and its impact on the disk's health. Reason why we fall back upon reputed and proven programs written by experts, which do all the interpretation and present the status of its health and performance. We use both CrystalDiskInfo and Hard Disk Sentinel to cross-check that the SMART data presented are the same. Hard Disk Sentinel is much more elaborate in that it logs the data and by clicking on each attribute/parameter one gets a graphical view of how the parameter has been changing with time - its progression.

Note 2: For an effective comparison, one should change the settings in CrystalDiiskInfo to present the value in Decimal rather than the default Hexa Decimal
To convert the RAW value being shown in hexadecimal to decimal in CrystalDiskInfo, go to Function > Advanced Features > Raw Values > select 10[Dec]

PerpetualCycle said:

SMART Percentage Used 0x4D = 77 decimal. So 77% of erase cycles used. It is good until it hits 0%. So only 23% of its erase cycles are left.

At the rate the OP is going, of using 12.8%/year, there is about 1.8 years of use left.

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I think you are misunderstanding what the health means. The drive is not going to stop working when the health reaches 0%. The health is only a probability of its lifespan. I assume it is based on average lifespans for SSDs. However, like any drive it will eventually fail. The older it is and the more it is used the probability that it will fail increases. In any case you should be making regular backups and be prudent and replace it before it fails.