I'd like to know how long SSD's should last before they "die". As on Bit-tech a few days ago in the article about the Samsung 470 SSD's it says near the bottom: 171 years of constant use?! Obviously I'm guessing most people are on their first SSD drive like me, so it's hard to tell, but does anyone have any info to share that may help? Will my SSD really outlive me? Or is this just the new Samsung ones? I have a Crucial C300 64GB.
It's a mean time before failure. It doesn't mean much without the variance from the mean. It also doesn't even pretend to guarantee that the drive will last that long... I would imagine the variance is still better than rotating rust, but that still didn't stop IBM shipping Deskstars with a 1Mhr MTBF.
Lifetime of a Flash-based SSD is completely dependent on how much you use it. If you were to write constantly at even 25% of max write speed to it 24/7, the drive would be dead within a week. With 20 GB writes/day it would easily last 5 years. Basically, an SSD is a stupid idea for something like a video editing station where constantly large (many GB) raw videos are being written to disk, but quite okay if you just play games and browse a bit on the 'net
Yeah, this also annoys me. Journalists on all hardware sites (not just here) keep referring to the MTBF in years and joking about it, without grasping the simplicity of the concept. 171 years MTBF doesn't mean the drive will last 171 years. It means if you run 171 drives for a year, on average, one of them will have failed. If they manage to ships 17.100 drives, they will expect 100 of them to fail during the first year, or roughly 2 each week. That's what the numbers mean, and they are important for two groups: 1) big companies that run these drives by the hundreds. They factor in the cost of the replacements and the work needing to be done to replace failing drives into the actual running cost of the whole datacenter. 2) the manufacturers themselves. They need the number to predict how costly their service program is going to be, so they can set a price for the individual drives.
