SSDLife Free, Show Life Expectancy Of Solid State Drives
Solid State Drives are slowly becoming the new mainstream storage devices. It may still take a few years before they replace platter based hard drives but it will happen eventually. Currently both price and storage volume are not competitive, but this will change in the future. PC users who followed SSDs from the very beginning may still have stories about bad life expectancy and locked storage in their mind. The first retail generation of solid state drives had lots of issues in this regard.
With newer generation drives those factors have been mitigated or eliminated completely. Still, some PC users may need to check on their SSDs from time to time to make sure that they provide the same performance and reliability as in the beginning.
SSDLife Free is a Windows software program that can check the life expectancy of a solid state drive. It interprets the SMART data of the drive. The free version of the program supports only one connected SSD. If more than one drives are connected only the first will be analyzed and displayed.
When you start the program for the first time data about the first SSD of the system is collected and then displayed on the screen. This includes a general drive health rating at the top with the estimated lifetime of the solid state drive. The information are more detailed in the middle of the window. Here you see your drive's model, the total drive space and free space, the work time in hours and days and the times the drive has been powered on.
The program displays furthermore if TRIM is supported by the drive, and the estimated life expectancy in more detail. Lastly, it also displays how much data was written in Gigabyte in the SSD's life.
The expected lifetime is handy to know, as it allows users to make preparations to replace the drive when the time of "death" comes nearer.
SSDLife Free can display the SMART data of the drive in an online report in the web browser.
Users with one Solid State Drive installed on their computer can download the free software from the developer website.
Advertisement
Excellent program, however I don’t know how right on it is. According to my SSD manufacture, it’s supposed to last 2,000,000 hours which is 83333 days which is ~228 years.
Anyone want to comment on this?
And there’s a portable version for both the free and pro versions!
Jojo, I agree. I have a 250GB HD & use <80 of that..I burn stuff to disc or put it on thumbdrives.I purge junk regularly.
As to the complaint ''Please avoid generalised, unprovable comments in your journalism, it really doesn’t do you any credit,'' it is an element of good prose to avoid the constant use of qualifiers such as ''In my opinion'' or ''to the best of my knowledge.'' See Strunk & White,viz., "Omit needless words." Writers always express their opinions.
Darn, someone beat me to this ;). I had this on my todo list, as a someday utility. Oh well ;)
After trying it, I would like to congratulate the developer. He/she/they did it ‘right’ and so I see this becoming the standard utility in this category. I can now cross this item off my list of things to maybe do someday, as it has already been done wonderfully.
Puts paid to the idea of SSDs having a very short lifespan! 9.5 years (even if very optimistic) will last the lifespan of a computer – unlike modern large platter based HDDs (especially in laptops) in my experience.
Factor in the cost of replacing a standard drive at least once (and the hassle/cost of reinstalling/configuring/losing data) and the future for SSDs looks brighter.
I reckon Martin’s about right – 2 to 3 years could see SSDs take over inside computers and relegate slower larger HDDs to NAS and external storage.
Another great utility program, Martin. I don’t know where you find them all. :-))
Here and there mostly ;)
“It may still take a few years before they replace platter based hard drives but it will happen eventually. ”
Surely the very existence of this article and this software proves that over-blown assertion to be bullshit? Take a look at the latest 1TB platter-based Seagate drives. SSDs have a long way to go before they get anywhere near that capacity. Even with the current extortionate prices due to the Thailand floods, SSDs still aren’t cost comparative.
Please avoid generalised, unprovable comments in your journalism, it really doesn’t do you any credit.
You are wrong PD. And you are overly arrogant to boot. Show some respect and chill out.
Relatively few people need TB’s of storage. I have 2.5TB of disk storage on my system and I am using less than 40% of that total. Which means 60% sits empty. And 640GB of the used total is my CD collection in FLAC format (320GB twice – primary and backup). If it wasn’t for the music collection, I’d be using less than 20% of my available storage!
I have seen many people who barely use 20% of a 500GB hard drive. Photo’s don’t take much space nor does a modest MP3 collection. There really aren’t a lot of regular people who download or rip movies (which take the most space). MOST average people could be quite happy for a long time with 200 or 300 GB of SSD storage.
Further, as many people switch from PC desktop to laptop computers (a growing trend), they will tend to get SSD’s rather than hard drives installed.
The real use for 2 and 3 TB hard drives will be for slower, external back up storage connected to their laptop computers as needed.
SSD prices will come down a lot quicker than you might imagine. And many people will be happy with smaller SSD devices instead of humongous hard drives that they use relatively little of.
You are right, I should have mentioned that this is my opinion and not a fact.