SSD Lifetime vs HDD lifetime

hard drivessd

I never used a SSD .

But reading so many articles about SSd performance , i'm thinking to change my HDD and to get a SSD.

But i've read that the SSD's lifetime is short comparing to a HDD.

My actual HDD ( Western digital Black ) has work more than 7 years ( intensive work almost every day) without any defect.

Is there any approximate lifetime for a SSD , and what's happen with stored data when a SSD lifetime is over ?

Thank you !

Best Answer

Here is a recent article on Google's experience with SSDs. It was based on:

  • Millions of drive days over 6 years
  • 10 different drive models
  • 3 different flash types: MLC, eMLC and SLC
  • Enterprise and consumer drives

Key conclusions

  • Ignore Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER) specs. A meaningless number.
  • Good news: Raw Bit Error Rate (RBER) increases slower than expected from wearout and is not correlated with UBER or other failures.
  • High-end SLC drives are no more reliable that MLC drives.
  • Bad news: SSDs fail at a lower rate than disks, but UBER rate is higher.
  • SSD age, not usage, affects reliability.
  • Bad blocks in new SSDs are common, and drives with a large number of bad blocks are much more likely to lose hundreds of other blocks, most likely due to die or chip failure.
  • 30-80 percent of SSDs develop at least one bad block and 2-7 percent develop at least one bad chip in the first four years of deployment.
  • SSD UBER rates are higher than disk rates, which means that backing up SSDs is even more important than it is with disks. The SSD is less likely to fail during its normal life, but more likely to lose data.
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