Solid State Drives (SSD's) explained

DJai · 20 May 2020 at 12:31

When I heard that SSDs would become a thing years ago, I always thought that they promised safe data storage for decades as there aren't any moving parts. Why are they affected by and killed by data read/write?

PiKe · 20 May 2020 at 15:33

They can just outright fail like any electrical device, there's no substitute for backing up.

pcuser · 31 Aug 2021 at 12:37

DJai said:
When I heard that SSDs would become a thing years ago, I always thought that they promised safe data storage for decades as there aren't any moving parts. Why are they affected by and killed by data read/write?

Well they need electricity to store data. If they are not connected for long they may lose data.

ProfGunna · 20 Jan 2022 at 10:05

This is great. Super useful.

mrk · 28 Feb 2023 at 20:06

pcuser said:
Well they need electricity to store data. If they are not connected for long they may lose data.

This might have been the case for early SSDs, but it is not the case for modern SSDs. Have yet to see any SSD in recent years lose data after not being plugged in, hell even USB flash drives use the same principle or storing data, on flash chips, and they remain unplugged for years/months without losing a bit of data.

I am firmly filing this under myth.

Also the write limits on sectors is also a non-issue. By the time the average user gets anywhere close to writing the maximum TBW of the drive, the whole PC will be ancient including the drive anyway. Someone calculated a while back that you'd need to be writing to the drive constantly for several years to reach the TBW max of a decent SSD.

My old Intel 730 Series Skulltrail 480GB had a 128TBW, I wrote over 300TBV to it and it was still reading 91% health by the time I sold it on and upgraded to NVMe. Granted that SSD had Enterprise grade components, but given when that drive came out, newer drives are rated far higher for write endurance..

DJai · 1 Mar 2023 at 10:00

mrk said:
This might have been the case for early SSDs, but it is not the case for modern SSDs. Have yet to see any SSD in recent years lose data after not being plugged in, hell even USB flash drives use the same principle or storing data, on flash chips, and they remain unplugged for years/months without losing a bit of data.

I am firmly filing this under myth.

Also the write limits on sectors is also a non-issue. By the time the average user gets anywhere close to writing the maximum TBW of the drive, the whole PC will be ancient including the drive anyway. Someone calculated a while back that you'd need to be writing to the drive constantly for several years to reach the TBW max of a decent SSD.

My old Intel 730 Series Skulltrail 480GB had a 128TBW, I wrote over 300TBV to it and it was still reading 91% health by the time I sold it on and upgraded to NVMe. Granted that SSD had Enterprise grade components, but given when that drive came out, newer drives are rated far higher for write endurance..

That's very reassuring.