BI SSD Average Life

Vettester

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My BI machine recently experienced a boot drive failure (WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD) after 4 years and I am curious as to what kind of life others are getting out their solid state drives? On a side note all of my videos are written to and stored on a WD Purple drive.
 

bp2008

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I've seen plenty of SSD failures in my time, usually within the 1-2 year timeframe it seems like. But my sample size is very small. Most SSDs should last 10+ years I expect or until their write endurance is all used up. In theory if the write endurance is all gone they controller would make it become read-only, but I haven't ever seen it happen so I'm not sure.

The shitty thing about SSD failures is they tend to just die suddenly with no warning. Just one minute they're working as normal and the next minute it is gone as if it was unplugged. That is not how all failures happen of course, but most of the ones I've seen have been that way. Only one I can think of remained visible to the system but lost its ability to read or write any data and so the system was really bogged down trying and failing to use the thing until I unplugged it.
 
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I have used four SSD's for the 'C' drive/boot drive over the years in home builds. The only one to fail was a Crucial in one of my wife's gaming machines I built. It was installed in 2011 and became finnicky about three years later. Would randomly error out on boot up. Changed it to an Intel.

I have had a Samsung in my office machine since 2013 with no issues.
 

Sphinxicus

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I have an ocz-agility 3 SSD that im using on this PC that i built about the end of 2010 as my gaming PC. When i was running Win7 i used it as a cache drive alongside a wd black spinning rust HDD. When i updated to Win 10 i ended up using the SSD solo as the boot disk (but its only 80GB!!). And the HDD as a 'Slave' drive. The SSD is still going strong despite being powered on for 24087 hours and is reporting 91% 'life left'.

On the other hand, i bought a samsung NVME drive a few years back to use as a small but nippy datastore in my ESXi host. That lasted about 3 months before it started failing weekly SMART tests. I could list files on it but couldnt copy the actual data from it nor could i write to it. That was replaced under warrenty and so far its replecement is humming along fine in use solely for my BI VM boot drive.

Like @bp2008 said, if they are gonna fail before one would expect, they tend to go quickly.
 

TonyR

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My BI machine recently experienced a boot drive failure (WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD) after 4 years and I am curious as to what kind of life others are getting out their solid state drives? On a side note all of my videos are written to and stored on a WD Purple drive.
The 8 Samsung EVO 860's and 870's 500GB SSD's I've installed the last 2 years are all still running.

I installed a WD 500GB Blue 3D NAND SSD ( price was LOW) last year in a doctor's office HP AIO and its' still going; it was from amazon and it has a 5 year warranty. Maybe yours is still in warranty.
 

concord

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I have a couple 128GB MLC SanDisks still going, I think they are around 7-8 years old. Instead of replacing my Thinkpad T40 and X200 laptops, placing a SSD gives them new life (Linux-based). Had one Kingston and Crucial die, however I have numerous Crucial and Samsung SSDs at work. The Samsungs seemed to be faster than the Crucials. It's been a couple years since I bought any new Samsung SSDs (I believe they are now owned by Seagate).
 

spammenotinoz

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I got my first SSD 11 years ago and have installed at least a dozen since, with no failures that I'm aware of. However, this thread is reminding me it has been too long since I've run backups.
Older SSD’s are generally brilliant as manufacturers didn’t know how long they would last and due to consumer fear they were drastically over provisioned. These days due to far more usage data, and cost pressures manufacturers have backed right off.
 

Flintstone61

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Samgsung and Crucial and Intel are the brands i have had in systems. If they came with an SSD that worked, I 'd just leave it. But usually the pc's on ebay would ship with a spinner. Then I'd buy a Samsung evo, and copy Windows to that. None have just died. The intel that came with the 9020 Optiplex is getting slow for some reason...So i copied it over to a Samsung 871 ( Dell Oem part# for something like an 870 or something I believe) onto a Dell Precision 3630.
Funny thing is it seemed to copy over the Stammer, stutter.....for opening files on other drives. Not sure what that is about. But I'm not in a position to do a clean install, as my Quickbooks, for my business is on this drive. Maybe on a slow night in December....
 
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TonyR

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The intel that came with the 9020 Optiplex is getting slow for some reason...So i copied it over to a Samsung 871 ( Dell Oem part# for something like an 870 or something I believe) onto a Dell Precision 3630.
Funny thing is it seemed to copy over the Stammer, stutter.....for opening files on other drives. Not sure what that is about. But I'm not in a position to do a clean install, as my Quickbooks, for my business is on this drive. Maybe on a slow night in December....
I've faced this twice in the last year when I wanted to clone existing HDD's over to SSD's that were running but "impaired." On both I tried running CHKDSK and then SFC /SCANNOW from an elevated (admin) command prompt but it didn't fix issues (100% disk access in Task Manager) even though it said it did.

I then removed the spinners, placed on my external USB dock and repeated the process using my Win 10 PC. It fixed both of them, I confirmed good running back in the PC's so then I was able to use Macrium Reflect Free Edition to clone them to SSD's. The repaired PC's ran everything great.....Quickbooks, MS Office 2019, etc. The biggest difference I could tell on the repaired PC's was boot up time from cold went from about 2 minutes to 20 seconds and opening QB went from 90 seconds to 15 seconds.....nice!

I do Win 10 clean install with the MS Media Creation Tool on a USB flash drive whenever possible, they run the best but cloning is OK when it would it would be a huge hassle to re-install a bunch of licensed s/w on some clerk's municipal government PC.

I've installed about 12 Samsung 860 and 870 SSD's in the last 2 years, also one WD Blue SSD. I've got a Kingston 64GB that's about 7 years old and a Sandisk 240GB that's about 6. I've only installed 2.5" form factor to date and all and still going. IMO, installing a good SSD is the single best upgrade you can do, I prefer it even over more RAM or even possibly the trouble and expense of a upgraded CPU. For now, Samsung 870 EVO 2.5" is my go-to.
 
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