How To Extend The Lifespan Of Your Old SSDs

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SSDs (Solid State Drives) manage data differently from old school Hard Disk Drives. In an HDD, data is written on moving discs using a head, whereas an SSD stores data in NAND cells, with each cell only capable of going through a certain number of write cycles before it starts degrading. This means SSDs have limited lifespans by default, usually measured in TBW (terabytes written). If you have an SSD with 80TBW, how long it lasts depends on how long you take to write 80TB worth of data on it — if you're downloading or transferring 10GB of data each day, your SSD will last around 22 years, whereas using 50GB a day sets this back to just above 4 years.

This doesn't mean your SSD is sure to die the moment it runs out of write cycles, but the individual NAND cells start degrading when this happens. Your drive will be more prone to data corruption, it won't operate at full capacity, and the entire SSD can fail at any time.

You can't extend your SSD's lifespan beyond its total rating, but there are still things you can do. The easiest way to do this is by performing fewer write cycles. If you reduce your downloads or how often you move large files, it'll take a longer time for your SSD to run out of write cycles. Additionally, just like how heat is bad for your laptop, putting your SSD in extreme temperatures can shorten its lifespan. Managing PC temperatures and not storing your drives in hot environments is another way of keeping SSDs healthy.

We've discussed how each cell in an SSD can only go through a certain number of write cycles before it stops functioning properly. If data was written randomly across different cells or in a sequence, there would be certain cells that fail much faster than others, causing the drive to fail sooner than you hit its TBW limit.

To combat this, modern SSDs have a feature called wear leveling. As the name suggests, this levels the wear among all available cells instead of putting more wear on certain ones. Since the wear is distributed equally, no one cell dies before others, giving you a lifespan much closer to the marketed TBW rating.

However, how well wear leveling works depends on how much empty space you have on your drive. On a mostly empty SSD, any data can be distributed among all the cells. However, if you only have 20% of your total storage space empty, the data has a lot fewer cells to be divided among. This leads to those specific cells failing faster than the ones you use to store long-term files. If you want an SSD that lasts long, don't keep the storage constantly filled with large files and programs — consider backing up important files to an external drive and deleting ones that you no longer need.

Knowing how to maintain and care for your SSD is important, but so is knowing how to monitor its health, and the easiest way to get an idea of how long your drive will last is to look for its TBW online. Samsung is one of the biggest SSD manufacturers, and its 2TB SSD 990 Pro has a capacity of up to 1200TBW; if you download 650 GB worth of data every single day, it'll take 5 years to run out of cycles.

This is useful if you're buying a new SSD, but if you've already had yours for a while, you likely don't know exactly how much of its capacity has already been used up — and even if you've just bought a new one, it helps to monitor its health routinely for signs your SSD is about to fail.

Fortunately, most modern NVMe SSDs have S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), which makes it incredibly easy to scan their health. There are many ways to do this: you can download a free third-party software like CrystalDiskInfo, use the manufacturer-specific program (such as Samsung Magician for Samsung drives), or simply open Windows Settings, go to Storage, Advanced Storage Settings, and then click on Properties beside your drive. Whichever method you use, you'll be able to see the drive's health measured in a percentage.