What should I do when the SSD life ends?

I get this health report and tells me that my SSD life ends in January2013, what happens to any data in the drive, do I need to transfer any data to a spinnig drive externally? or can I still use it after 2013?

 

well, you should do what you always do every day because your ssd life might end this very minute:
backup

maybe it lasts longer, maybe it'll die then. maybe a bit before. maybe today.

backup, and then recover from the backup when the ssd actually died.

 

I don't trust those meters anyhow. Maybe for a week or two you did a lot of writes then for a while only normal OS operations and it's estimating you're doing more writes than you actually are. Plus every drive has different wear leveling algorithms and depends on the type of data, etc.

As daveperman says, with any computer, backup, backup, backup. As long as you have a reliable duplicate somewhere your chances of losing data are very slim.

 

Here's the procedure. Do this for every single drive (SSD or conventional) you will ever have:

1) Backup weekly. Daily if necessary.

2) Use your drive until it stops working.

3) Buy a new drive, restore from backup. Go to step #1.

That's it. Ignore the fancy meters, etc. The only time you should ever pay one iota of attention to SMART is when it reports that the drive is about to fail or is failing. Then you take one last backup (not replacing an existing one, mind you), and go to step #3.

(If you read the bit about SMART and said "but wait, what about the _____ indicator", then ignore the above -- you know enough that it doesn't apply to you. )

 

ThinkRob +1! LOL.

So true though. People worry so much about drive failures, battery failures, and failures in general. The best solution is to have a backup plan for everything. Just use the laptop as you need and backup on a regular basis. Done.

 

take out a BIIIIIIIGGGG life insurance plan on your drive. you might get a better deal if you buy a coffin and plot now. get an intel or crucial/micron drive next time.

 

I should add to the above: for mechanical drives in a server setting, SMART can be incredibly useful. It's just that unless you're using drives for which you know you can trust the SMART data (i.e. specific enterprise-level drives) and know how the data applies to you, it's not a terribly useful tool for anything other than knowing "OMG we're doomed BACKUP NOW".

The various SMART indicators are tricky to interpret and can often be misleading -- and I *definitely* wouldn't trust anything that tries to boil it down to a single progress bar, particularly not if that extrapolation comes from a hardware manufacturer...

When SSDs fail due to wear, the data is usually still readable -- at least it is on drives that meet modern industry standards -- you just can't write to it. So when the first page fails on your drive you ought to be able to read the data just fine. Of course when that happens you definitely shouldn't keep on using the drive!

Now if the controller fails... well then you're pretty much screwed. (Not to slam certain manufacturers too much here, but I've never seen an Intel or Micron controller fail flat out on me. I have seen *multiple* Sandforce and JMicron-based drives simply cease functioning. Just my $0.02)

So backup, damnit!

 

Not all drives, especially SSD's, report SMART data properly or all the same, that's the problem. That's why some new drives will say it has like 70% health left, and people freak out.

 

Thank you all for your contributions, I think it's better to enjoy the ssd now without worrying about what would happen in 2013. Thanks again.

 

The world will end in December 2012. Don't worry about it.

 

didn't it end like, last week or something?

 

SSDLife FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions



What will happen when the lifetime expiration date comes?

As we already described in the answer to the question “How do you calculate the SSD health and lifetime”, the lifetime expiration date changes dynamically depending on the amount of data written to the drive. But as the drive health is getting lower, the lifetime expiration date will keep getting closer and closer. The peculiarity of SSDs is that after their lifetime is over, the data does not disappear from them. They just become read-only, you can read data from it, but you cannot modify it.

So we'd rather recommend that you replace your SSD with a new one a month or two before the lifetime is over and use the old drive to store not very important data. And of course, do not forget to back up your data regularly!

 

Thanks for the link and an excellent explanation.

 

It's only an amount of lifetime calculated for the rated number of write cycles. It's actually possible for the SSD to last much longer than the rated life time.

 

What really happens when it ends ? It just dies or something? We are forced to buy a new SSD?

 

LOL like my G2 SSD. Hundred years or so expected lifetime with my use

 

You will no longer be able to write. Actually there will be some indication that your drive is "failing" because available space to be written to will shrink. To be honest, your controller is likely to fail before the SSD NAND write cycles are exceeded anyhow. That would be more of a concern to me because if the controller fails, well you can't write OR read anything from the drive. I've owned / sampled a decent number of drives, probably 10-12, and out of those three ended up with failed controllers. Replaced under RMA but still, your data is gone, so another reason to backup.

If your controller does survive, I'd say over 90% of "normal" users will get over five years out of their SSD before write failure, probably more, and most of those will most likely update their drive before then anyhow.

 

That is quite heartbreaking actually, although I agree that at some point before the failure or life, consumers would most likely change their SSDs to newer ones.

 

I dunno. While I do have a number of old desktop hard drives lying around, few are used much if at all that are more than five years old anyhow. I mean five years ago, I don't even think consumer desktop drives reached the 1TB threshold until 2007 or so. And five years ago 160GB 5400RPM notebook hard drives were the max capacity and speed, 80GB - 120GB were more normal. If I asked you to use a 80GB 5400RPM drive today you'd strangle me. SSD's in five years will seem the same. In any case I sure wouldn't put anything critical on a drive more than three or four years old anyhow.

 

Apparently there is a failure mode associated with SSDs that data which has not been written for 5-10 years, may fail to persist in the flash cells. This is, IMHO, more worrysome to me than a SSD failing due to being overcycled.

 

Is is that thing about the data fading away?

 

Doesn't wear leveling cause the entire drive to be re-written every now and then, though, which should refresh the flash cells?

 

If it's plugged in and used on a regular basis, it should. It could be a problem if you just let an old unused computer sit in some dark corner of a storage room for a couple years though.

 

which shouldn't be the case for your typical high cost ssd investment system. shouldn't be a problem right now at least.