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SSD Endurance Update

Y

Yeahyeahyeah123

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 30, 2017
49
15
So 5 months ago, I brought up that I wrote 8200GB in just 6 months (an average of 45GB/day) to my SSD. Currently, I have only added 900GB since then (an average of 7.83GB/day).* It turned out that Outlook, Skype, and DropBox were constantly writing to the drive. Plus, there were several startup items in the background that were always running.

*Now, I mostly use my phone or just go to the websites to check email/files manually.

Although the newer drives have impressive endurance, I thought this might be useful in preventing unnecessary wear and tear for someone else.
 
Even with your previous usage your drive would have lasted at least 50 years. There's no reason to restrict your usage to prolong its life.
 
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It would be good if we had actual data on SSD's that died - how long was it used, did it die because the NAND chips could no longer be written to or some other reason and the usage profile of the user(s) of the SSD. I haven't seen such data (but haven't been actively searching for it).

On one hand, there's the test which a Samsung 850 Pro died after 9.1 petabytes of writes. On the other, as the OP has illustrated, it may not be readily apparent that one is doing so much writing to the SSD. If a user uses a few more cloud services, downloads a lot of videos and/or does video editing work, I can see where they might actually wear out a lower-capacity (thus, lower endurance) SSD (128GB) in a few years if the actual endurance is a bit less than the rated amount.

So, for people who can take what they consider non-intrusive steps to reduce SSD writes, that's probably a good idea. But of course, there will be people who obsess on it to the point where the cure is worse than the disease. (What I do is have downloads go to a HDD and use videos on HDD's as well. I don't use cloud services other than email.)

The big thing for Mac users is that as time goes on, Apple is making it more difficult and expensive to replace SSD's with off-the-shelf replacements. With the MBP's that have used PCIe SSD's, Apple has tended to use SSD's with NAND chips with higher endurance, but will that always be the case? So SSD capacity in terms of not only what you need but how long it will last becomes a factor and unless the cost of a Mac is trivial for one's finances, one should consider easy steps to reduce SSD writes.
 
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I have barely used my 2017 MacBook Pro 13' (1TB) - I have 72GB of data on it total.

I have no idea why the SSD has 9TB read and 3.85 TB saved especially because I haven't put that much data on this laptop but the life is 0%. I remember when I bought it, it had terabytes read/written (factory testing?).

I've had 80GB Intel SSDs that were used as a Windows OS Drive for years and years (5?), then my gaming drive for WoW for 7+? years. They had 98% life left when I retired them.

The larger the drive, the longer it lasts. I've had 256GB Samsung SSDs, 500GB Samsung Evos, and now my MacBook Pro has a 1TB. I'm not very worried about the life of the drive. I use my 500GB Samsung 850 EVO for my MBP's Windows Virtualbox drive, and Blizzard installation drive but just cuz I don't want all that space being used on my 1TB MBP drive but I imagine this helps the life a tiny bit.
 

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Glmnet1 said:
I found this: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
Click to expand...

I had read that report and it was pretty interesting but what I'd like to see is a report on drives that have died (but from which use data can still be retrieved) from people who used it for normal day-to-day use rather than controlled experiments.

I have an OCZ Vector 150 (240GB) in my 2012 Mac Mini which was in day-to-day use for 3 years (I'm on the computer for much of the day) which had a 90TB endurance rating. I've edited quite a few videos on the Mini (quite a bit of data is written to the video cache on the SSD but the input/output videos are on HDD). It's less frequently used now but I recently checked and it had a 93% health rating.
 
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Endurance of modern SSDs is 100TBW and higher... they will live longer than a platter hard drive. It doesn’t make any sense to bother with endurance figures, unless you have very special needs in that regard
 
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Yeahyeahyeah123 said:
So 5 months ago, I brought up that I wrote 8200GB in just 6 months (an average of 45GB/day) to my SSD. Currently, I have only added 900GB since then (an average of 7.83GB/day).* It turned out that Outlook, Skype, and DropBox were constantly writing to the drive. Plus, there were several startup items in the background that were always running.

*Now, I mostly use my phone or just go to the websites to check email/files manually.

Although the newer drives have impressive endurance, I thought this might be useful in preventing unnecessary wear and tear for someone else.
Click to expand...

Drives will have a write endurance value as part of their warranty. Lots of drives today have a guaranteed write endurance of between 150-200TB (250GB drives usually have the former, while 500GB and larger have the latter.) Given your 8.2TB of writes in 6 months, which was described as being somewhat constant, you would hit 150TB in about 9.15 years. Given that example, I would ask people this: “Do you think you’ll still have that drive in 9 years, or do you think you will have moved on to something with a larger capacity by then?”
 
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I think for most SSDs you have plenty of grace time to move data off before they ‘fail’ as such (including a warning when the drive starts to detect significant deterioration and also a read-only period so you can take the data off). I asked the question on the MBA forum (the air being the model that introduced SSDs) and no one had reached a read only state yet, a good decade later (and the drives on early airs were only 64GB!) Apple also use MLC rather than TLC SSDs which have (generally speaking) greater endurance.
 
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duervo said:
Drives will have a write endurance value as part of their warranty. Lots of drives today have a guaranteed write endurance of between 150-200TB (250GB drives usually have the former, while 500GB and larger have the latter.) Given your 8.2TB of writes in 6 months, which was described as being somewhat constant, you would hit 150TB in about 9.15 years. Given that example, I would ask people this: “Do you think you’ll still have that drive in 9 years, or do you think you will have moved on to something with a larger capacity by then?”
Click to expand...

Nice post. If it is an Apple SSD too then if it was like mine it came with several TB written from factory. I abused and used my 80GB SSDs for over a decade and they reported 94% life left when I retired them. These things last a long long time.
[doublepost=1527515041][/doublepost]
maflynn said:
My 2012 rMBP is going strong, and its beeing used quite consistenly. 6 years and going strong, I'm not terribly worried about it at this point and since the laptop is 6 years old, at this point it doesn't owe me anything.
Click to expand...

I’m expecting to get at least 6 years out of my MBP 2017 - after that, yep, it wouldnt owe me either. Let’s see if this keyboard lasts. :)
 
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duervo said:
Drives will have a write endurance value as part of their warranty. Lots of drives today have a guaranteed write endurance of between 150-200TB (250GB drives usually have the former, while 500GB and larger have the latter.) Given your 8.2TB of writes in 6 months, which was described as being somewhat constant, you would hit 150TB in about 9.15 years. Given that example, I would ask people this: “Do you think you’ll still have that drive in 9 years, or do you think you will have moved on to something with a larger capacity by then?”
Click to expand...
The thing is I don't know what I will be using the computer for in 2 or even 5 years. It freaked me out that I was eating upwards of 50GBs of data/day doing something passive and not doing much photoshop or video editing. I just wasn't willing to write 50GB a day just for simple tasks. I think 1TB is going to last me awhile for whatever jobs I choose to pursue. I plan on keeping the computer for 5+ years so I didn't want to excessively write to the drive if I didn't need to.
 
I think most users will get rid of their laptop before the SSD fails due to age. I got 2TB of SSD storage just so I don't have to carry around HD drives or worry about my drive being full all the time (which causes the drive to die faster). I think it's Shocking Apple sells a PRO laptop with 128GB of storage. I mean you can't even back-up your iPhone to your computer...lol
 
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The software tools not from the SSD manufacturers will read the SMART data. The issue with SMART is that it's meant for HDD's and a similar effort to standardize it for SSD's has not been undertaken (to the best of my knowledge). So you should either use the manufacturer's software or software from a developer that understands the differences in how data is reported by different SSD's. For example, the following is from Hard Disk Sentinel:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility_ssd.php
I haven't used this product or endorse it but to me it says that they at least understand that each SSD model can be different in how they use SMART data. It's important for such software to understand that how many blocks of data has been erased is the important data, rather than the number of bytes written.

Of course, the problem for Mac users is that companies like Samsung and Crucial have software which only works on Windows. The 93% health status I mentioned in my post #6 comes from the Toshiba/OCZ SSD utility which can be used via USB-bootable flash drive (Linux). Unfortunately, the utility doesn't report a lot of specific data.
 
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