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When it comes to how long SSD's and HDD's will last half of the people say it usually stays healthy for 3-5 years before they die, while the other half say "Even if you write 20 GB every day you can use it for a hundred years"

Who am I supposed to believe? They're completely opposites, it's almost as if one or the other is speaking fairy tales.

I recently bought a 2TB modern SSD and am worried if it'll fail three years from now, as I bought it based on price. I download 35GB a month on average (unless for some reason web browsing use should be included).

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    It heavily depends on the brand if it reaches the life expectancy. Cheaper brands usually die after about 1 or 2 years. Premium brands include SanDisk and Samsung.
    – LPChip
    Oct 23, 2018 at 7:27

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In real life, the truth is somewhere in between, but those saying 20 gig / day for 100 years are closer to the mark.

The Tech Report did a fairly comprehensive study on SSD longevity and found that for 240 GB disks, most failed after 1000 TB of data had been written (in the best case 2400 TB) - this is not to say the performance did not degrade. By my calculations, if the drive can perform 1000 TB of writes at 20 gigs / day, it will last almost 137 years. I do not believe this 137 years is realistic (and I've had some SSDs die on me, so this is a little more then just guessing)

But that's not the full picture - SSDs certainly slow down over time, and the larger the drive the more over provisioned it can be, so the more writes can be spread.

When I researched this before moving enterprise loads onto SSD, I concluded that -

  • SSDs can handle lots of writes.
  • SSDs have about 10x the reliability and 10x the performance of HDDs
  • When SSDs fail they tend to do so without warning.
  • I would expect an SSD to last more then 5 years - which is how long I would expect a computer to last.

Also worth mentioning, if you take an SSD and stick it in a closet (ie no power), it will eventually (after months or a few years) start loosing data.

Also, its not uncommon for SSDs to come with a 5 year warranty. Enterprise drives often come with a 10 year warranty.

With respect of HDDs -

They are not as reliable as SSDs. Their failure rates are better understood as they have been around a lot longer. Consumer drives will likely last 3 years, with about a 20% per year chance of failing after that. A lot of this comes down to exact make and model and luck.

Enterprises consider HDDs as consumables and this is why RAID is fairly standard on servers and workstations. A company called BackBlaze publishes annual reports on their HDD experiences, which makes interesting reading. Last I read (which was long ago) Hitachi drives - now owned by Western Digital were reliable - every other brand was hit and miss - depending on model. Backup Blaze gave Seagate a reliability edge over WD - although my experiences in NZ are very different (but my sample size is statistically to small)

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    Thanks for the feed back. How long did those SSD's last before they failed may I ask? Also what's your estimate year on average based off what you said (if one was to use it casually).
    – 419chris419
    Oct 23, 2018 at 7:13
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    It's too soon to tell. SSDs only became viable in the org I work for about 3 years ago. Only 1 (out of 30 or so) desktop drives started failing - and that was going slow, rather then being unreadable. I've had compatibility with some drives dropping out of RAID arrays, but I think that was RAID specific, and 1 more-or-leas DOA drive. My personal server drives (about 4 years old I guess) are still working fine.
    – davidgo
    Oct 23, 2018 at 7:21
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    It also depends heavily on the brand of the SSD. Some brands will fail in one or two years.
    – LPChip
    Oct 23, 2018 at 7:25
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    @lpchip is that still true - Certainly I believe that some brands are a lot better then others but I tentatively concluded that a lot of the early failure brands were due to firmware bugs which I'd expect have been largely ironed out now.
    – davidgo
    Oct 23, 2018 at 7:36
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    @davidgo, yes that is still true, unfortunately.
    – LPChip
    Oct 23, 2018 at 8:40
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The oldest disks in existence are less than hundred years, so nobody could know whether a disk will last that long. It may be true given the guaranteed write amount or a SSD divided by 20GB/day usage, but there are other components that will probably fail sooner.

For HDDs, there is also mechanical wear to consider.

In general, you should assume that any drive, new or old, will fail at some point and keep a backup of your important data.

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