External hard drive life span?

[schwine1]

I've been using an Seagate external SSD drive for a few years now.

I occasionally add files to it, and rarely delete files from this external drive.
I've never had any problems with it, and it's been completely silent given that it has no moving parts.

Given it's age (five years) and my casual usage as noted above, how long might this hard drive last?
How can I tell when this external drive is starting to "wear out" and be in need of replacement?

Thanks for any tips.

 

[Fishrrman]

This is an SSD, right...? (no moving parts)

SSD's are relatively new to the computer world.
(I said, "relatively")

As such, I'll speculate that no one really knows yet "how long" an SSD will last, vis-a-vis the typical life of a platter-based hard drive.

I'm thinking that "a key" to SSD longevity will be applying power to it now and then, to "refresh" it (can't think of a better word). Perhaps once a year, or once every 6 months...

 

[schwine1]

Yes, it's SSD.
Thanks, I have no further qestions and I would like to close this thread.

 

[Boyd01]

I have a 512gb 2013 MacBook Air that was used very heavily until last summer. Never had any problems with the SSD. I also have a 2012 quad-core Mini Server with an original Apple internal 256gb ssd. I got it from OWC (aka MacSales) in 2016, so, not sure what kind of use it had before. No SSD problems there either.

But since your thread title references "hard drives", Backblaze publishes some detailed stats that might be of interest

2020 Hard Drive Reliability Report by Make and Model

The AFR for 2020 dropped below 1% down to 0.93%. In 2019, it stood at 1.89%. That’s over a 50% drop year over year.

www.backblaze.com

This is what they have to say about SSD's

Are Solid State Drives / SSDs More Reliable Than HDDs?

It's good to know the difference between HDDs and SSDs and understand how the different SSD technologies affect reliability.

www.backblaze.com

 

[Boyd01]

Yes, it's SSD.
Thanks, I have no further qestions and I would like to close this thread.

Moderator Note: We only close threads in unusual circumstances. This is a good topic and others may wish to contribute in the future.

 

[ght56]

The best way to know IMHO is to check the actual statistics on the drive's health. This program allows you to pull health data from the drive, which can give you an idea of the possible lifetime left and if there are any prefail indicators that suggest the drive is on its way out. These statistics are not perfect at predicting failure as all types of media have some situations where they are working perfect one second and dead the next, but these stats still do a reasonably good job in predicting many failures. (Obviously, even with a monitoring app as such, you would not want to keep unique data on any single drive if that data is important.)

I've got a few 10+ year old SSDs that are still functioning great and show excellent health. I've also had two SSDs that failed within about three years of ownership.