When should you retire an SSD?

About five years ago I bought my husband a Samsung 840 1TB SSD. It's been actively used pretty much everyday since it's been installed, which is no small task as my husband is a video editor. It occurred to me the other day that SSDs can't last forever so I booted up the Samsung magician software which said the drive status was still "good" but that he had racked up 65TBs worth of data usage on this drive. While I'm not too concerned that it will imminently drop dead (that's what back ups are for) what do you think you think would be a sensible time to make the swap to a new drive? In the same way you change the tires on your car after "x" amount of time or wear.

If I do put the drive out for pasture while it still has some life in it I could sell it to the likes of "CEX" (after data wiping it) and recoup some cash.

I look forward to hearing your input :)

Sounds like it has done 65 total drive writes probably out of about 1000. As long as you are taking backups, you are probably OK for a while. It could be argued that a new drive has more chance of failure than one you know works.

Mechanical drives are different, I try to replace them when they get to the end of their warranty period as that seems to be how long the mechanical parts are designed to last for. But solid state drives, specially one of the reliable brands like Samsung or Intel, I tend to replace them with something large before I get any worries about reliability.

Some of the Samsung 840 SSDs use a type of flash memory that is susceptible to severe slow down over time, just like the flash memory in my old Nexus 7 1st gen Android tablet. Samsung addressed this issue by releasing a firmware update that periodically re-writes old data to the SSD. Provided that you have installed the latest firmware update via the Samsung Magician software you should be perfectly fine to continue to use the SSD indefinitely. I am still using one of my 6+ years old 120GB Samsung 830 SSDs (> 18TB written) as a scratch disk today.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SUMMONER

I am still using one of my 6+ years old 120GB Samsung 830 SSDs (> 18TB written) as a scratch disk today.

---

I'm still using a six year old 240GB Samsung 830 drive in my main PC...26TB written, and counting :)

When it dies/ceases being writable. You should always assume that *any* storage medium could die at any point, and keep regular backups accordingly.

When it dies, make sure you're keeping daily backups.
I would say it could easily last another 3-5 years if you are lucky. You're probably able to do at least 500 Terabytes Written - have a look here for enduance testing on your model of drive. anandtech dot com /show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand

If you want to be very proactive then sure change them when the 5 year warranty runs out but I don't personally see the point if you have backups.