SSD wear might be the most overhyped hardware problem

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SSD wear has been a hot topic of discussion ever since we started moving from mechanical hard drives to solid-state ones, but has the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the durability of these drives actually panned out?

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Every time you write data to an SSD, you wear out the memory cells it uses to store information. Reading these cells doesn't cause wear, but the energy used to alter the state of the cell's contents makes it a little less capable of holding its charge every time it happens. There are different approaches to designing SSD, with SLC (Single Level Cell) being the most robust. Then we get MLC, TLC, and QLC: Multi-, Triple-, and Quad- Level Cell designs.

These cells store one to four bits of data per cell, but the more bits you try to represent in a cell, the sooner the wear on that cell makes it impossible to tell them apart. SLC is the fastest and most robust of the four, but as you can probably tell, it's the most expensive, since you need more cells to make up, for example, a 1TB drive. This is why SLC drives are usually only sold in lower capacities.

As the above chart from memory maker Kingston shows, there's a dramatic difference in how many write cycles each type of memory cell can handle, and you wouldn't want to use a QLC drive for jobs that require lots of writing operations. SLC memory cells are rated for 100K erases, MLC for only 10K, TLC for 3K, and QLC a mere 1K cycles.

3D NAND memory adds another wrinkle to this list of cell types, because it's one of the main reasons SSDs have come down in price, alongside other advancements, of course. Here the memory cells are stacked in the third dimension, dramatically increasing memory density, and thus lowering costs. Think of it like building apartment towers instead of houses. You can house a lot more people on the same land that way.

SSDs are designed to be durable, but can still exhibit data loss if powered down for extended periods of time

Over the years there have been several deliberate attempts to wear out consumer SSDs to see just how much punishment these drives can take. The most famous of these torture tests was by Techreport, where six SSDs were subjected to deliberate intense writing until they gave up the electronic ghost. It took more than 18 months for this to kill all six drives.

In the end, most of these drives managed to write more than a petabyte of data. Far, far more than they were warrantied for. Of course, these SSDs have all sorts of features built-in to ensure they live as long as possible. There are a set amount of "overprovisioned" redundant cells that can be quietly switched out with failing ones. The drive's onboard "brain" uses wear leveling to ensure that data writes are spread out over cells so that some aren't prematurely fried. Some of the TLC drives in that experiment didn't reach the petabyte mark, but were still so far over their rated numbers that it didn't really make them less impressive.

Bear in mind, this was about a decade ago, and the latest generation of SSDs are smarter, have better endurance, and will likely last even longer than those early models because of it.

I bought my first SSD as part of a netbook I needed for university. This machine had a whopping 8GB SSD inside, with very low rated write endurance. I was genuinely worried that this small SSD would be worn out before I finished my on-campus studies, but it turns out the battery died long before the SSD did. When I sold that netbook after three years of ownership, the battery was the only thing that needed replacement, and I'd worried about it for no reason at all, despite many magazine articles at the time showing how easy it was to nuke one of those netbook SSDs with a torture test.

Since then, I've bought a heap of SSDs, but my oldest drive is now eight years old. A SATA III gaming drive from Samsung that has been absolutely hammered with terabytes of game downloads, then spent some time being hammered as a video editing scratch drive, and currently lives attached to my PlayStation 5, so I can get better loading times on PlayStation 4 games without using the internal SSD.

Similarly, my wife works as a video editor, and her SSDs are frankly brutalized with hundreds of gigs in 4K footage every week, and have been for years. Not a single SSD that we own has yet failed. The main reason I've replaced them is that I want faster and bigger drives, so I tend to simply convert my old drives into external ones.

That said, you'll find plenty of anecdotal evidence to the contrary on online forums. Just because SSDs have proven reliable on average, doesn't mean you couldn't be the victim of bad luck, or a bad model. In 2023 Samsung was forced to release fixes for its 900-series SSDs, such as the 990 Pro and 980 Pro. These drives showed rapid degradation despite relatively low amounts of writes, and that's not what you want on a high-end drive. These issues are rarely the result of actual hardware problems, but bugs in firmware. Which just goes to show that software magic is one of the main reasons SSDs are so robust. There's a lot of heavy lifting that happens invisibly on the drive itself, and we only realize it when things go wrong.

Just like mechanical hard drives, SSDs can fail spontaneously for any reason. However, on average, your SSDs will likely far outlive their rated write endurance numbers. However, what will kill your SSD fast is running it too hot. This is a major issue in data centers where things can get really spicy, but as long as you have good cooling in your system, and use an SSD heatsink where possible, you really don't have to worry about this issue. That said, modern SSDs will also throttle themselves when they get too hot, so even if your cooling fails or can't quite handle peak performance, the drive will try to save itself by running at lower intensity.

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