I have an SSD that's around 5 years old now. It used to be in my laptop. But then I upgraded my laptop and put it in a homeserver. It still works perfectly well but from what I've read, SSDs fail suddenly without much prior indications.
Do you think I should replace it already? It's not running any super important stuff. If it dies, it'll just mean that my media servers will be down for a day, not a super big deal since I have regular backups. I feel bad creating unnecessary e-waste, so I'll love to know your experience with SSDs and how frequently do you usually replace them.
Also, if you know a tool which can help me detect remaining lifespan of an SSD, that'll be very helpful. Thanks.
Not always does Crystal disk completely shine through the disk.
Had a sandisk 512GB SSD which was completely fine.
One day it suddenly became very slow with read and write performance. It was in the <20mb/s range amd painful to recover data from.
CrystalDisk said everything is fine. Health = Good.
Regarding the write cycles: If they ar used up the cells should enter a read only mode so that you should be able to recover the data from. Bad time if it's the OS though.
Regarding the write cycles: If they ar used up the cells should enter a read only mode so that you should be able to recover the data from. Bad time if it’s the OS though.
This has never happened to me, but I suspect it's because the controller is the primary failure point here.
Agreed, i mainly mention Crystaldisk because its a quick free tool. Definitely reccomend using multiple avenues of info gathering to determine hardware health.
They've not been used too much, I think. My laptop had very typical laptop usage: browsing, reading docs, coding, nothing storage intensive. On the server, the most intensive usage is for PhotoPrism and Jellyfin, and I don't think that's anything out of the usual.
Sounds like you've already answered your own question.
It might die. If it does, it's not a super big deal. You have backups. You don't like creating unnecessary e-waste.
As gets have said, crystal disk info can help detect any existing problems, but it can't predict the future if something happens suddenly. So it can be a good indicator, but don't assume it's 100%.
They don't die any more suddenly than a spinning drive, but they do have limited lifespans. Use SMART tools to check the lifespan data. And check for firmware updates since sometimes there are bugs that can cause them to wear out quickly.
But really the important thing is having backups, which you said you have.
Check the life remaining on the drive with crystaldiskinfo it should give you a nice percentage of life but I go off how much data it has seen.
An SSD from 5 years ago is probably rated for around 200TB written, but I would check your model. As long as you are below the TBW with no corrupted sectors, the SSD is fine to keep using. I would probably back it up more frequently, and keep checking crystaldisk for any changes.
But I what I haven't seen mentioned yet is that you could buy your replacement now. I had an SSD die suddenly (no SMART error) and the most annoying thing was the server being down until a new hard drive could arrive.
Not a huge deal, but if the SSD goes on to last for X more years, buying an SSD today to save a bit of time will seem pretty poorly thought-out in retrospect