Is it possible to find out if a SDD is old from S.M.A.R.T values?

Bree said:

Age of the SSD and Power On Hours will always be different. The latter is only the hours it has actually been powered up and in use, unless it's left turned on and in use 24/7 then it should be significantly less than the physical age.

The only really significant factor as far as wear on an SSD is concerned is the Total Host Writes, which in turn gets reflected in the Wear Levelling count (endurance) that cereberus referred to.

Like Ghot I have a 500GB Samsung EVO 860. Mine had a hard life in a PC running VMs, hence nearly 17GB written and 97% wear left. Samsung's specified Total Bytes Written (TBW) for an 500GB EVO 860 is 300TBW, so plenty of life left in it yet.



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Did you mean 17 TB not 17 GB? 17 GB would be used up in one clean install.

BTW if 3% is used by 17 TB , that would suggest vendor endurance is nearer 600 TB. I find back calculated endurance figures for drives to be wildly different to figures quoted on web. Of course, even then real endurance is usually much higher. I reckon vendors deliberately quote lower endurance than reality simply to avoid warrant type claims.

cereberus said:

Did you mean 17 TB not 17 GB?

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Ooops! I'll edit it now...

cereberus said:

if 3% is used by 17 TB , that would suggest vendor endurance is nearer 600 TB. I find back calculated endurance figures for drives to be wildly different to figures quoted on web. Of course, even then real endurance is usually much higher. I reckon vendors deliberately quote lower endurance than reality simply to avoid warrant type claims.

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You're probably right. 300 TBW is Samsung's published spec for an 860 EVO 500GB and the figure they use for their guarantee: 5 years or 300TBW, whichever is sooner.

When I got my first SSD I read this, then stopped worrying about 'endurance'....

I just installed CrystalDisk and Screenpresso so I could check mine, since it's at least a year old . . . I haven't taken the time to read how to interpret, so could someone tell me what mine looks like?

Wynona said:

I just installed CrystalDisk and Screenpresso so I could check mine, since it's at least a year old . . . I haven't taken the time to read how to interpret, so could someone tell me what mine looks like?

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Although you have only includes a partial snapshot, one thing is clear. You have only used 1% of SSDs nominal life. So it will last 100 years, probably not quite enough to outlive you LOL.

cereberus said:

Although you have only includes a partial snapshot, one thing is clear. You have only used 1% of SSDs nominal life. So it will last 100 years, probably not quite enough to outlive you LOL.

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Thanks, @cereberus.

I do want to leave something behind for the kids!

Actually, the thing most people do not realise is that an SSD is far more likely to fail nowadays due to electronics interface failures more than running out of write ability.

As @Bree says his warranty was 5 yrs or 300TB whichever comes first. So we are kind of being silly saying an SSD will last 100 years.

What we mean is SSD would last 100 years at current write rates, assuning it does not fail for another reason WHICH is very unlikely

In this respect, the real lifetime of an SSD is probably something like 10 years (significantly longer than warranty period of course so nobody ever claims). If you are unlucky it could fail earlier, or longer if lucky but few will fail in warranty period LOL.

So in the end, an SSD probably has a real average life expectancy similar to an HDD.

Everybody should be clear - none of the monitoring tools can really help you assess when a drive will fail for say electronic interface failure. As with all electronics, the major cause of failure is heat and mosture. So an SSD running hot due to extended use in a short period is more likely to fail than one used more gently and cooler on average.