What is the average life-span of a solid-state hard drive? What factors determine the life span?
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Related info covered on the Super User blog– Sathyajith Bhat ♦Aug 21, 2011 at 4:41
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Sorry! I don't keep up on the SU blog...– daviesgeekAug 21, 2011 at 14:56
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3 Answers
I've had a Intel SSD in my Macbook Pro for well over two years now and have no experienced any issues.
It seems many SSD manufacturers seem to quote 10,000 operating hours for their warranties. Now assuming that this is lower than what the drives are actually capable of that would still mean over a year of 24/7 running with constant drive reading/writing. Now I don't have any stats as too normal operating times but I doubt you'd be doing more than two hours of constant reading/writing a day which would put the lives of the drive at around 10 years of everyday use.
Lets just say I'm not too worried, just make sure you have backups, but then again you should do that regardless.
An SSD should endure about 100,000 write cycles and have 10% extra flash blocks to replace damaged. So the life span really depends on how much information you going to rewrite on it. I know case where SSD was destroyed after one year BUT it was used by professional film maker as storage drive in digital video camera, where 1 hour takes about 100GB, and then the data was rewritten many times during video editing.
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If I was to get an SSD, I would be using it for video editing. In fact, that would be my main reason for it. Aug 21, 2011 at 4:23
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I don't think the technology has been available long enough to say for certain (and it's still constantly improving), although Jeff from CodingHorror gives us a depressing estimate of about 200 odd days from his experience.
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