SSDLife, a program just to scare you?

What a load of old cobblers. Even with hard drives it's not possible to calculate any kind of meaningful 'life remaining' time from SMART data, you may as well wear a blindfold and throw a dart at a calendar. It's even less possible with SSDs where many of the SMART attributes are either not reported or have been re-purposed in various ways by each vendor.

The developers of this utility just seem to be trying to make a buck on the back of all those idiotic scare stories about SSDs having short lifespans.
 
I agree it seems a bit silly for HDDs, but surely there's some validity wrt an SSD seeing as the flash memory does have a write limit before the cells begin to degrade and become read only, especially when this is a function of data written and thats easily monitored via smart data.
 
Whilst the article below is over a couple of years old I would like to believe that it is still valid as I have not read anything else which has made me think otherwise...


A small snippet...

There are also concerns about wear. That is, flash has the potential to wear out after tens (or hundreds) of thousands of write cycles.
This characterization, however, is too simplistic, according to Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung. A flash device that is rated at 100,000 write cycles, for example, can write 100,000 times "to every single (memory) cell within the device," Yang said. In other words, the device doesn't write to the same cell over and over again but spreads out the writes over many different cells. This is achieved through "wear leveling," which is carried out by the SSD's controller, he said.
This would make it virtually impossible to wear out a flash chip. Yang said a pattern could be perpetually repeated in which a 64GB SSD is completely filled with data, erased, filled again, then erased again every hour of every day for years, and the user still wouldn't reach the theoretical write limit. He added that if a failure ever does occur, it will not occur in the flash chip itself but in the controller.
Click to expand...



Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9876557-64.html

... programs like SSDLife can help to perpetuate a fear that, for me, has very little substance.
 
the thing that bothers me most about wear is the pagefile and temporary files which write very often to a disk
 
wish they had an option to move /Users folder.
in resource monitor htcsync tool (stopped that as i don't really use it), firefox and thunderbird constant sqlite writing to the drive.
 
UberTiger said:
I agree it seems a bit silly for HDDs, but surely there's some validity wrt an SSD seeing as the flash memory does have a write limit before the cells begin to degrade and become read only, especially when this is a function of data written and thats easily monitored via smart data.
Click to expand...
Just keeping track of how much data has been written to an SSD isn't going to be much use in determining its useful life because there's far too many other variables involved. As the article linked by Vimes points out it is the number of writes to the most used flash cells that's the crucial factor, but there's no way for an external utility to access that information. And it may not be much use in any case since most SSD firmware keeps track of cell write counts and will re-direct writes away from any cells that have been heavily used, extending the time before they hit their maximum number of write cycles. On top of that there's the usual variability that affects all electronics. One cell may go fail exactly on its rated number of writes, another will keep going for thousands of extra cycles.

And of course, as you mention, there's the fact that SSDs don't actually die because flash cells have worn out and gone read-only. Even if the drive's pool of spare cells has been used up (and generally it's a big pool, several GB in size on most drives) wiping the drive and partitioning it with some unused space will bring it right back to normal operation, possibly with quite a bit of useful life left. To be honest, this whole issue has been bigged up way too much. Wear just isn't a problem for SSDs in desktop systems, hence the complete lack of SSD owners reporting worn out drives. My own most heavily used SSD in an old Intel G1 that's had a pretty hard life and it currently reports a sum total of a big fat zero failed cells.

Most failed SSDs have died because of the normal random electronic failure that affects all computer components.
 
Yeah, good, points but what that guy says from the article conflicts with what I read on the OCZ forums a while back about so many gigs of data per day being written to the drive would wear cells down after a few years. I was sure this was confirmed by OCZ but perhaps I'm remembering wrong. As long as the controller is doing it's job right as above I'd expect it to distribute the writes to each cell accordingly averaging the no. of writes each gets so the rate at which they begin to fail/become read only should still be sort of consistent with the amount of data written to the drive over it's lifetime.

It probably won't affect 95% of users in the drives lifetime, and it probably has been blown out of proportion, but it's still in issue even if minor. Will be interesting to see how real use has affected the majority of those shipped in the last 12 months a couple of years down the line.

Oh well, I'm just going to enjoy mine while I have it and hopefully get an even faster one as the tech progresses anyway :D
 
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