Expected lifetime of SSD Drives

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Expected lifetime of SSD Drives

I read that SSD drives tend to fail in around 3 years. I want to purchase a new iMac and hope to use it for at least 5-6 years. Does this mean that I need to expect to replace the 1TB SSD drive? I have never had an internal hard drive fail as long as I owned a desktop computer, which has normally been 6-7 years. I don't understand why apple would put these in their new 27" iMacs if this is the case. Your comments, please, if you are knowledgeable about these devices.

Posted on Aug 30, 2020 2:11 PM

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Answer 1

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VikingOSX

Community+ 2024

Level 10

111,365 points

Aug 30, 2020 2:47 PM in response to noVice39

I installed an OCZ (now Toshiba) SSD in a mid-2011 Mac mini, immediately after I purchased it. That Mac is still working just fine, almost nine years later without any issues with that internal SSD.

Look at the mean time between failure MTBF figures from the vendor's website (unless it is an Apple SSD) for their drive. Convert that to expected drive usage hours and it is a very long time.

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Answer 2

Aug 30, 2020 2:44 PM in response to noVice39

i'm not sure i would buy that. i installed an SSD into an '09 iMac over 4 years ago and it was not showing any signs of failure. i gave it away about 4 months ago, and before that i did a black magic disk speed test and it was operating at or near the speed that it did when the drive was new. since it was my first HDD to SSD swap, i checked the disk speed regularly.(every 4-6 weeks.) never was there a sign of slowing down. just make sure you get a quality drive.

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Answer 3

samtenor

Level 4

1,684 points

Aug 30, 2020 3:20 PM in response to noVice39

SSD manufactures usually list their life expectancy -- if you are interested, there are sites "how to" calculate the life expectancy on SSD.

I adopted to SSD at early stage. when 256Gb SSD would cost more than 2012 Mac Mini i7 -- that my 2010, 2011, 2012 MacMini are still in top shape.

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Answer 4

HWTech

Level 9

55,676 points

Aug 30, 2020 5:34 PM in response to noVice39

With normal use an SSD should last 10 years before you write enough data to wear out an SSD since SSDs have a limited number of writes available to them. Most SSDs allow writing 25GB of data per day and will last for years. Now if you happen to do a lot of excessive writing to your SSD, then it may wear out much sooner.

Of course an SSD can fail at any time without any warning signs. So make sure to have frequent and regular system backups. It is impossible to recover accidentally deleted data from an SSD. All devices can fail ahead of their expected lifespan, but generally an SSD should last for 6 years of normal use.

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