SSD testing. End of life?

fred246

In 2010 I bought a Kingston 64GB SSDNow V SSD. I have used it daily since. I am suspecting it has reached the end of it's life and I had to reinstall Windows on it yesterday. Kingston don't seem to provide any testing software. I downloaded SSD life pro which said it was 100% bad and then tried CrystalDiskInfo which said it was 100% good. Anyone got any tips?

HappyMJ

It has an expected life span of 1 million hours (MTBF) although it has a 3 year warranty and that's when used 24 hours a day.

That many hours have not passed since 2010 so it's unlikely to have reached end of life through usage. It's more likely to become obsolete before failing but it is of course possible that's why it has a 3 year warranty.

A new one is just £30 so you may as well just replace it if you're unsure of it's reliability.

Fightsback

HappyMJ wrote: »

It has an expected life span of 1 million hours (MTBF)...........

It's not time which is the issue with SSD's, it's the number of write/erase cycles that wears out the cells.

What is crystal disk info (need latest version for this) telling you about the size of writes ?

Did you do things like turn off system restore and hibernation (suspend to disk) etc when setting up the drive as this reduces the number of write erase cycles ?

Plenty of guides on the web what to do with a new SSD to make it last longer.

Johnmcl7

I've seen a few SSD's fail and each time it's been completely without warning, the PC has frozen and then when restarted the SSD can't even be seen in the bios. Given the low cost of 128GB and 256GB SSD's, I'd replace it if you have any concerns it's on its way out.

John

londonTiger

HappyMJ wrote: »

It has an expected life span of 1 million hours (MTBF) although it has a 3 year warranty and that's when used 24 hours a day.

That many hours have not passed since 2010 so it's unlikely to have reached end of life through usage. It's more likely to become obsolete before failing but it is of course possible that's why it has a 3 year warranty.

A new one is just £30 so you may as well just replace it if you're unsure of it's reliability.

of course,

a home computer with a SSD is never going to be always on.

It's never going to go through each and every bit on the drive and write over it contantly. Maybe on boot and application launch it will have a lot of HDD activity but then when using word/excel/browsing the net the hard drive read/write will be very infrequent.

for practical purposes it will outlast a mechanical drive which needs to be constantly spinning while in use. the oldest SSD I have is 4 years old and it still works to this day, any mechanical laptop hard drive would have been too noisy ands slow to use after all that time. I've never had a primary mechanical hard drive last more than 5 years - they are constantly spinning - even on computer idle and wear out.

The sata interface and 2.5" form factor will be redundant long before the SSD depletes >5% of its writable bits for most users.