Is age (chronological, not TBW) a factor in when to replace an SSD?

eddiew · 21 Mar 2023 at 22:26

Hey folks,

As per title - I have a 960 Pro that passed it's warranty about 7-8 months ago. It's diagnostics are all good and it's showing about 85% life remaining. I guess I just don't write big files that often, because this has been my boot drive for its entire lifespan (I do have like... 3 other drives to spread the load, although mostly they are games/media drives and read a lot more than they write).

Should I be considering replacing it on the basis it's now chasing 6 years old, or is it more about the TBW than the time powered on? Asking because I plan on a 7800X3D build soon, so it's a great time to swap a drive out if that's sensible.

Cheers!

mrk · 21 Mar 2023 at 22:35

It's not really about any single particular criteria, if there are bad blocks on it or the SMART data shows errors and the health has degraded, then yeah think about replacing it. Otherwise age alone doesn't matter.

Run Samsung Magician, inside it is a sector scanner feature which will scan every sector, if that checks out and info displayed in the SMART status shows nothing major, then keep on using the SSD without any worries.

CapitalOne · 21 Mar 2023 at 22:39

When I hit 45 I replaced them all and went full m.2

eddiew · 21 Mar 2023 at 22:47

mrk said:
It's not really about any single particular criteria, if there are bad blocks on it or the SMART data shows errors and the health has degraded, then yeah think about replacing it. Otherwise age alone doesn't matter.

Run Samsung Magician, inside it is a sector scanner feature which will scan every sector, if that checks out and info displayed in the SMART status shows nothing major, then keep on using the SSD without any worries.

Last I checked magician it was very happy, but I will give it another look to be sure. I only really paid attention to the remaining lifespan but I should actually bother with the other info

CapitalOne said:
When I hit 45 I replaced them all and went full m.2

...took me a while to work that one out :cry:

But 1.5 of my 2tb of ssd storage is in m.2 format; I'm pondering consolidating the old boot drive and (aging) sata drive into a single 2tb m.2. Probably a sn850x, because despite a long history with Samsung drives, the recent news about 990 (and 980) problems has me wary of their current gen. I have no brand loyalty at all, if I don't trust the individual product, I'll pick someone else's!

mrk · 21 Mar 2023 at 22:53

How much data is written out of interest? My 970 Evo Plus 1TB is on 41TBW and showing as 99% still which is quite interesting given that Samsung rate it to 600 TBW for the 1TB version, so unless it's reporting health wrong, then the specs are far higher than on paper for endurance

Tetras · 21 Mar 2023 at 23:08

eddiew said:
Should I be considering replacing it on the basis it's now chasing 6 years old

No.

eddiew said:
or is it more about the TBW than the time powered on?

In my opinion: yes. If the drive is lightly used, I'd have no concerns whatsoever about keeping it as a boot drive. If it has been very heavily used, then I'd take the opportunity to move it over for storage (AM5 motherboards have plenty of slots).

Mcnumpty2323 · 22 Mar 2023 at 00:32

Still using a Samsung 830 here
Maybe 12 years old by now?
As always as long as anything important is backed up
Then the age of it doesn't bother me

eddiew · 22 Mar 2023 at 09:34

mrk said:
How much data is written out of interest?

On the 960 Pro boot drive, coming up on 50 TB written. Apparently specced for 400 TBW so... Anyway, showing 95% health in Crystal Disk Info and HWInfo shows 95% remaining life.

The other two drives are below 10 TBW... they're mostly game+media and 99% of what they do is reads I guess ^^; Showing 100% health in CDI and 99% remaining in HWI.

It's possible I don't need to do anything. These drives are aging, but they haven't been heavily written to, despite the 960 often being my working files drive when I'm drawing in Photoshop or Manga Studio.

I might consider swapping the 960 for capacity however. It's only a 512GB, and it might be nice to get a modern 2TB in the new build. I honestly don't know if I will feel a difference going from a 3500mb/s to a 7000mb/s though. My hunch is that programs can't make use of the data as quickly as these drives can supply it...

mrk · 22 Mar 2023 at 09:59

Your hunch would be correct, there is no noticeable difference between those speeds in day to day use! That has been my experience going from the 970 Evo Plus to the 990 Pro, and then Sabrent 4 Plus-G.