Data advice on SSD longevity

An expert Insight on how to prolong and stretch the life of your drive. All it takes is a little education, and some new ways of managing storage that have nothing to do with your traditional hard drive’s maintenance routine. 

What wears down an SSD?

An SSD is flash storage. It has no moving parts. So unlike on a traditional mechanical hard drive, nothing breaks. SSD wear and tear has to do with write cycles. 

 Flash storage handles data in a specific way. When data is written to a block, the entire block must be erased before it can be written to again. The lifespan of an SSD is measured in these program-erase (P/E) cycles. Modern, consumer-grade, Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND memory can generally endure about 3,000 to 5,000 P/E cycles before the storage’s integrity starts to deteriorate. The higher-end, Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory chip can withstand up to 100,000 P/E cycles.

You’d have to work hard to reach the P/E cycle limit for an MLC-based drive, let alone an SLC-based one. Nevertheless, every time you write something to the drive, you bring it a little closer to its demise. Don’t obsess over every single write cycle—a few of our later tips are best suited for such tendencies—but do check out the following techniques for minimizing unnecessary writes to the drive. 

What to put on SSD, what to put on HDD

Another key to SSD longevity is to use it for the right kind of data. SSD is great for applications, operating systems, and games, to crush load times and boot up applications at lightning speeds. There’d be nothing wrong with using SSD for data such as music, pictures, movies, and documents, but you don’t need the speed—and you probably wouldn’t want to waste write cycles on constant uploads and edits. A traditional, mechanical hard drive would suffice for the latter kinds of files.

Hibernating uses more writes

For those who have an SSD-endowed laptop, note how hibernation mode differs from sleep mode in SSD usage. When your computer hibernates, it stores open documents and programs to the SSD and shuts down completely. Sleep will pause everything, but it won’t write to the drive.

There are downsides to sleep mode: It uses a little more energy than hibernation, and if your battery runs down, those sleeping files are toast. In the case of an SSD, however, it makes economic sense in the long run to use a little extra power to avoid making unnecessary writes to the drive every time you step away from your system. 

How long will SSD last?

For the average user who doesn’t write heaps of data to storage constantly, your SSD will probably live a long and happy life. And if you adjust your storage habits to the SSD’s strengths, you could squeeze a few more cycles out of the drive.