SSDReady calculates how long your Solid State Drive will last

Martin Brinkmann
Jun 19, 2014
Software
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12

First generation Solid State Drives were notorious for issues such as performance deterioration over time or a low life expectancy. Things have improved with every new generation of drives and technologies up to a point where many of those issues do not play a big role or any role at all anymore.

While that is the case, it is still important o know the strengths and weaknesses of SSDs. While performance is excellent, deterioration not such an issue anymore and the Gigabyte per Dollar rating also improving, life expectancy may still be an issue.

Solid State Drives allow for a finite number of writes and while that number has improved significantly, it is still important to understand that these drives don't last forever.

The popular Samsung Evo 840 120 GB drive for instance will last 28 years if you write 10 Gigabyte of data to it per day. That's a long time if you do not hit that 10 Gigabyte mark. If you write 20 GB on the other hand, that number halves to 14 years, while 40 GB per day drop the number to 7 years.

So, it depends largely on how much data is written to the device on average.

SSDReady is a free program for the Windows operating system that takes that into account. It monitors all write operations on a drive to compute the drive's approximate life time.

After you have started the application you need to hit the start button to start the monitoring. Values such as total writes and reads are recorded as are projections for the whole day.

The program uses the values to calculate the approximate life of a 40 Gigabyte modern SSD Drive. While that is not all that useful, you can click on the estimate SSD life button to get better values on the developer website where it highlights the approximate lifetime for popular drives from Intel, Crucial or Western Digital.

The main problem here is that a 40 GB SSD is not really standard anymore. It would make sense if the developers would at least use a 120 Gigabyte drive instead for their calculations as they would surely be more accurate then.

While that is the case, they won't reveal the exact life time after all, but you get an approximation that you can work with. What you may be able to do though is visit the manufacturers site and see if information are provided on it about the device's life time.

You can use the other information that SSDReady makes available to calculate values that are more accurate.

The professional version of the application adds several interesting features to it. It sorts the processes by data written to the Solid State Drive for instance which you can use to reduce the write operations on the drive.

Verdict

SSDReady is a handy program even though its life estimation is not using the installed Solid State Drive's size or manufacturer information to compute the life expectancy. It would make a whole lot of sense to add a database of known SSDs to the program and use the actual size of the drive to calculate the life expectancy of it.

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Comments

  1. Tuan said on May 17, 2015 at 11:46 pm
    Reply

    This Tool assisted me with an SSD upgrade for a server. It mainly helped me determine the amount of writes per week the server was using so i could then find the proper SSD that could handle the total TBW and calculate the estimated life cycle. This tool shows “Gb” by default so don’t confuse that with “GB” when doing the math.

    It showed me the RAID ARRAY was doing [500Gb] Written per day which adds to [62.5GB] Written per day.
    62.5 x 30 (days) = 1,875GB Written per month
    1,875 x 12 (months) = 22,500GB or 22.5TB Written per year

    So if you buy an SSD rated at 300TB Written (TBW) you get about 13 years if you do about 62.5GBW per day.
    300 / 22.5 = 13.33 Years

  2. ilev said on June 22, 2014 at 8:47 am
    Reply

    The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte. And then there were three.

    …We started with six SSDs: the Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, Intel 335 Series 240GB, Samsung 840 Series 250GB, Samsung 840 Pro 256GB, and two Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB. They all exceeded their endurance specifications early on, successfully writing hundreds of terabytes without issue. That’s a heck of a lot of data, and certainly more than most folks will write in the lifetimes of their drives.

    The last time we checked in, the SSDs had just passed the 600TB mark. They were all functional, but the 840 Series was burning through its TLC cells at a steady pace, and even some of the MLC drives were starting to show cracks. We’ve now written over a petabyte, and only half of the SSDs remain….

    http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on June 22, 2014 at 9:32 am
      Reply

      Interesting test, thanks!

  3. PhoneyVirus said on June 20, 2014 at 8:59 pm
    Reply

    Nice and just in time, got a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB TLC SSD three days ago. Here’s something else that could be useful if you own a SSD, CrystalDiskInfo I fine pretty cool and it’s portable.

    Thanks for the Tutorial Martin

    PhoneyVirus

  4. intelligencia said on June 20, 2014 at 5:23 am
    Reply

    Hello Mr. Brinkmann and fellow techies!

    I have an All Solid-State Laptop (two drives) that I purchased in October of 2010.
    I use the free Intel SSD Toolbox to monitor the health of the SSDs.
    According to its diagnostic of my system . . . the SSDs look internally like the first time I purchased it – – in Pristine condition with No Signs of wear and tear evident!
    (This Program is ONLY for Intel-based SSDs)

    I also WRITE my video; music and other files to my External Hard Drive (Buffalo) which helps to preserve the good health of my SSDs which I use mainly for the operating system [Windows 7] and storage.

    i

  5. XenoSilvano said on June 20, 2014 at 12:22 am
    Reply

    These are my results from SSDLife (I already knew they would going to be good):

    MKNSSDCR240GB-DX (FW: 507ABBF0) Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240GB
    Total/free Size: 240.0GB / 23.4GB
    Work time: 12324 hours (1 year 4 months 28 days 12 hours)
    Powered on: 266 times
    Trim: supported, enabled
    Health: 99% S.M.A.R.T
    Estimated Lifespan: 8 years 4 months 20 days (damn!)
    (T.E.C date – November 09, 2022)

    I didn’t expect them to be this excellent though.

  6. dante said on June 20, 2014 at 12:20 am
    Reply

    Based on this my SSD would only last 2 years. Good thing I didn’t get one.

  7. ilev said on June 19, 2014 at 7:02 pm
    Reply

    I use SSDLife Pro. Estimated life time for my SSD drive December 2022
    http://ssd-life.com/eng/download-ssdlife.html

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on June 19, 2014 at 7:34 pm
      Reply

      Interesting, thanks for the link.

  8. Jim said on June 19, 2014 at 6:48 pm
    Reply

    Considering the results of the Tech Report SSD Endurance Experiment, I’d say the lifespan of SSDs is becoming irrelevant. They’ll outlast 2 or 3 computers for the average user. They’ve written over a PETABYTE to them and they’re still going. The average user doesn’t write anywhere near that amount of data to a drive.

    As for this utility, I wish someone would write something like this for Linux. I have two SSDs in my Linux box, but no utilities to monitor them other than SMART.

  9. jeff said on June 19, 2014 at 5:36 pm
    Reply

    Considering very few people keep any hard drive for more than 7 to 10 years, I don’t see how SSD life expectancy is much of an issue anymore. In 1 to 2 years time, 1TB+ SSD’s will be at the same price 250GB SSD’s are now. I imagine most people will be upgrading their SSD’s to much larger capacities in the next 5 years anyway, and by then the life expectancy issue will be non-existent if it’s not already.

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on June 19, 2014 at 5:57 pm
      Reply

      It depends on how you use it. If you have average writes, then you should not really have to worry about that too much but if you write a lot of data to it, then you may want to keep these metrics in mind.

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