SSD

Anyone know what the average lifetime of a consumer SSD is, I have a crucial SSD with a 3 year warranty and google hasn't helped?

SSD lifetimes are defined by the total amount of data that is written to them, since each sector can only be written to a few thousand times before it wears out and has to be reallocated. Comparative studies have been done but all SSDs lose capacity as more and more sectors get reallocated.

Edited by micksharpe (Tue 01-Dec-15 18:46:50)

I've had my ssd for over 3 years and it's performance is only slightly diminished from when I first got it simply by using trim and garbage collection.
I think the normal user shouldn't worry about when their ssd is going to wear out as it'll last till your next pc upgrade.

Well the 3 year warranty is certainly longer than the year given on some mechanical drives. Note on upgrades I'm still using a P35 motherboard with an E8400 core duo cpu, I like to upgrade less often.

Make sure that TRIM is enabled in order to get the best performance from your SSD.

It is according to HD sentinel.

I've been using WD drives with a 5-year warranty of late, so far so good...

Ah yes WD black, I still have an external WD still going well out of warranty but you can't beat SSD for performance, my boot times are around 5 secs and program access is pretty quick.

Yes, my present 1TB 5-year old Seagate is starting to develop the odd bad sector. I'll replace with a Samsung EVO Pro SSD for system (younger son uses one and is very happy with it) together with a WD black for data.

Everything on my system is backed up every which way - maybe it's overkill, but rather that than underkill (if that's a valid word)

Picking up on an earlier comment about SSD defrag and Windows 10, I'm running Windows 7 Pro on this system, scheduled defrag is turned off, should I do anything to ensure Windows doesn't try to defrag an SSD?

I have a Corsair 128GB force 3 drive, that is just over 4 years old and is still working. a bit slow by today's standards.

I am looking at getting a Corsair Neutron XT the 240GB one looks good value.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Yes, my present 1TB 5-year old Seagate is starting to develop the odd bad sector. I'll replace with a Samsung EVO Pro SSD for system (younger son uses one and is very happy with it) together with a WD black for data.

Everything on my system is backed up every which way - maybe it's overkill, but rather that than underkill (if that's a valid word)

Picking up on an earlier comment about SSD defrag and Windows 10, I'm running Windows 7 Pro on this system, scheduled defrag is turned off, should I do anything to ensure Windows doesn't try to defrag an SSD?

That's why I bought a SSD as my seagate had 49 bad sectors and getting new ones every few days.

Also did a clean install of win 10 x64 as a dual boot from usb drive on the ssd and it only took 20 mins.

I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Modern SSDs probably have a greater expected lifetime than mechanical disks.

There is a free utility called SSD Tweaker that I used to use for configuring Windows 7 for SSD drives.
https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=ssd-tweaker
Although Windows 7 fully supports SSD drives it doesn't automatically configure them.
This all changed with Windows 8 and later where the process is automatic.
Other than that just check that the SSD isn't included in the scheduled maintenance for defrag, only for optimisation (Trim)
Does it show up as an SSD? In My Computer right click drive>Properties>Tools>Optimise>

Edited by deleted (Wed 02-Dec-15 00:04:21)

In reply to a post by rogerfp:

There is a free utility called SSD Tweaker that I used to use for configuring Windows 7 for SSD drives.
https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=ssd-tweaker
Although Windows 7 fully supports SSD drives it doesn't automatically configure them.
This all changed with Windows 8 and later where the process is automatic.
Other than that just check that the SSD isn't included in the scheduled maintenance for defrag, only for optimisation (Trim)
Does it show up as an SSD? In My Computer right click drive>Properties>Tools>Optimise>

How do you mean by configure, like turning on trim? i used my SSD on windows 7 and trim was on, and the Windows defrager ignored the SSD, the same thing happened to a mate of mine when he was using 7.

i do wonder what some people do with their hard drives, I have got a 250GB drive in my computer that is 6 years old and still not a problem with it. A mate of mine have drives that are older than that and have been pushed a lot harder than most peoples as they are used in a recording studio environment and yet every single one is still fine.

Edited by zyborg47 (Wed 02-Dec-15 08:36:36)

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Ido wonder what some people do with their hard drives, I have got a 250GB drive in my computer that is 6 years old and still not a problem with it. A mate of mine have drives that are older than that and have been pushed a lot harder than most peoples as they are used in a recording studio environment and yet every single one is still fine.

My Seagate that is starting to get bad sectors is the first HDD that I've ever had an issue with. I've retired others at 10 years as they were too small, but were still going strong.

I've always known that sooner or later I'd get an HDD problem, which is why I've got such a thorough backup strategy (20+ years ago I worked in the Business Continuation sphere (aka Disaster Recovery) and saw some horror stories that I wouldn't want to personally experience), the cost in both time and money need only be marginal, certainly compared to the value - sentimental or monetary - of lost data.

I bought two Seagate drives at the same time, one developed bad sectors the other still going strong.

According to HD Sentinel the Seagate drive that developed bad sectors has read 97tb since installation in Dec 2010, this sound about right?

Just run SeaTools for Windows on that drive.

Lifetime Bytes Read: 1.33TB
Lifetime Bytes Written: 584.23 GB
Power-on Hours: 21825
Annualized Workload Rate (Writes + Reads) * (8760/POH)@ 0.77TB/yr

I bought the drive 9 Feb 2011, so 12.4 hours/day for 1757 days.

Interesting? Maybe, certainly nothing like 97TB you, I think - mentioned.

Will check with seatools later.

Heres my seatools info

Lifetime Bytes Read: 506.08 GB
Lifetime Bytes Written: 314.91 GB
Power-On Hours: 43843
Annualized Workload Rate [ (Writes + Reads) * (8760 / POH) ]: 0.16 TB/yr

This is the identical drive that has no bad sectors, not sure where hd sentinel gets 97,000,000 mb from

Heres the crucial SSD SMART info from Crucial Executive

ID Description Current Value Units
1 Raw Read Error Rate 0 Errors/Page
5 Retired NAND Blocks 0 NAND Blocks
9 Power On Hours Count 53 Hours
12 Power Cycle Count 1 Cycles
171 Program Fail Count 0 NAND Page Program Failures
172 Erase Fail Count 0 NAND Block Erase Failures
173 Average Block-Erase Count 0 Erases
174 Unexpected Power Loss Count 0 Unexpected Power Loss events
180 Unused reserved block count 5569 Blocks
183 SATA Interface Downshift 0 Downshifts
184 Error Correction Count 0 Correction Events
187 Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0 ECC Correction Failures
194 Enclosure Temperature 29 Current Temperature (C)
31 Highest Lifetime Temperature (C)
196 Reallocation Event Count 0 Events
197 Current Pending Sector Count 0 512 Byte Sectors
198 SMART Off-line Scan Uncorrectable Errors 0 Errors
199 Ultra-DMA CRC Error Count 0 Errors
202 Percentage Lifetime Used 0 % Lifetime Used
206 Write Error Rate 0 Program Fails/MB
210 RAIN Successful Recovery Page Count 0 TUs successfully recovered by RAIN
246 Cumulative Host Write Sector Count 445940599 512 Byte Sectors
247 Host Program Page Count 14442906 NAND Page
248 FTL Program Page Count 16188749 NAND Page

Thinking about the figures I posted earlier. I can't believe they're correct. For a 1TB drive over 5 years, to have written less than 1TB over the 5 years, and read only a little over 1.33TB seems incredibly low. I have many files of 50GB or more on the drive which are rewritten every so often. And it is the only internal drive on the PC holding all System and data files.

No, I'm having difficulty in believing SeaTools. Unless the numbers have wrapped round...

I'll be installing an SSD in a few days and restoring to it a Windows 7 created system image. Given that the image was from an HDD-based system, will that image work on an SSD or will it have the wrong drivers or whatever?

Or maybe Windows will be smart enough to reconfigure for the SSD.

Win 10 will detect SSD after a clone not sure about 7.

You may need to enable TRIM manually -- Linky

As far as drivers are concerned, a SATA device is a SATA device. However, you might want to consider switching to ACPI mode if not already configured this way. (You can easily find instructions via Google.) As others have said, there are other changes that you might like to consider to optimise performance.

Do you mean ACPI or AHCI? Google throws up lots of references to AHCI and my BIOS has that as an option.

Not appreciating that it is only relevant to SSD drives, I did try changing from IDE to AHCI but Windows failed to boot. Have to wait till the SSD is installed so I can change it for that drive only - I hope.

I've also read that cloning a Windows installation from HDD to SSD can cause problems in that Windows doesn't access the SSD efficiently, for example

In reference to www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/284280-32-windows-install-clone:

Do a clean install of windows 7 and let the windows install creat the partition for you. This will make sure that your allocation unit size is the default 4096 and that the alignment of the partitions starting point is correct for that particular SSD. If you simply clone the old platter driver the alignment will be off and the SSD will not perform well.

Platter HDs us a partition offset of 63 empty blocks where a SSD should be set at 64 blocks. The windows 7 install will set this for you automaticlly when it creates the new partition on your new SSD.

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'll be better doing a fresh install of Windows 7. Wouldn't be the first.

Sorry, my bad. Yes I meant AHCI. The change will affect all drives (for the better). You need to go through a process to effect the change, but it is quite easy (or it was for me): http://www.neowin.net/news/neowin-guide-how-to-chang...

Good cloning software will make sure that the partitions are properly aligned. I think most partition managers allow you to adjust it if necessary.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

As far as drivers are concerned, a SATA device is a SATA device. However, you might want to consider switching to ACPI mode if not already configured this way. (You can easily find instructions via Google.) As others have said, there are other changes that you might like to consider to optimise performance.

i wonder if AHCI makes a lot of difference? i will have to have a search later when I get home from work and see if there are any bench marks.

There are loads of benchmarks around, almost all of which recommend the change. It's not a huge difference (about 5-10% in most tests) but it's free.