SSD lifespan explained: Here’s how to check your drive’s health

How long do SSDs last?

While most SSDs, even the most expensive ones have a limited writing capacity, it is not something you should worry about. Depending on your usage, the majority of SSDs will last you anywhere from a few years to a decade.

The life of an SSD depends on a handful of factors like how often you write data on an SSD and when you bought it, making it hard to determine its lifespan. The lifespan of an SSD is expressed in Terabytes Written, meaning if an SSD has a life of 350 TBW, you can write a total of 350TB before needing to replace it.

However, unless you write a lot of data to your SSDs, you are unlikely to reach the threshold during the drive’s normal lifetime. According to a 2016 study by Google and the University of Toronto, the physical age of the SSD is more of a determining factor than the amount of data written. If you have an external SSD, it is more likely to last longer than an NVMe or SATA SSD since you are not likely to continuously write new data on these drives.

CrystalDiskInfo can help you check the health of your SSD or HDD. (Express Photo)

How to determine the lifespan of an SSD?

You can easily determine the remaining lifespan of an SSD using either tools provided by the SSD manufacturer like Samsung Magician, or Western Digital Dashboard, or using a third-party utility like CrystalDiskInfo. Irrespective of the manufacturer, this tool works with the majority of SSDs and HDDs and gives you an idea of your disk’s health.

One thing to note here is that if you buy an SSD from companies like Crucial, Western Digital and Samsung, they offer anywhere between three to five years of warranty, so if you encounter any issues during that period, you are likely to get a replacement.