# If I use my SSD past it's rated endurance, does it mean my SSD will die afterwards?



## Primordiarch (Dec 16, 2020)

I still don't get what TBW means. I have looked up google and to my knowledge, endurance is all about warranty.


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## arbiter (Dec 16, 2020)

Everything has a rating as to what it is expected to do like tires are rated for xxx speed but they can go faster then that and be fine. It just means ssd is rated to last so long or so many TB being writen to it but likely that number is conservative number and it will last well beyond that but if anything happens well they will say it lasted longer then they claim it would so you got more then money outta.


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## ArdWar (Dec 16, 2020)

Primordiarch said:


> endurance is all about warranty.


That's what it exactly is. TBW is just a measure of manufacturers confidence on their product. They'll cover your drive under warranty if it fail before TBW, and not otherwise (other terms and conditions apply).

It doesn't mean that your drive will not fail before TBW is reached, nor that it will suddenly fail (or suddenly more likely to fail) after TBW is reached. Generally NAND flash failure probability gradually increase as the number of writes increase. Manufacturers TBW rating is a point when these failure rate increases to an amount where either it will cause warranty claims to start becoming uneconomical or exceeding certain defined limits (usually on enterprise drive, where there's strict testing metrics and marketing claim sometimes do carry legal weight).


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## Jetster (Dec 16, 2020)

If your having problems wrapping your head around TBW than try MTBF


edit mod note: ftfy


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## Caring1 (Dec 19, 2020)

"does it mean my SSD will die afterwards?"

Yes, nothing lasts forever.


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## evernessince (Dec 19, 2020)

It's an estimate of the minimum number of writes a drive can have before failing.

The actual number of writes before failure will vary from drive to drive but the manufacturer guarantees at least that much.


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## shashy (Jan 5, 2021)

It's just an estimate.


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## freeagent (Jan 5, 2021)

If you use it normally it should be ok. I looked at my old 120GB Intel 520 that I put in my moms laptop. I bought that thing new and paid the premium. It’s still got 97% life with 24.17TB written, and 23.47TB read. It’s gotta be close to 10 years old by now.


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## ThrashZone (Jan 5, 2021)

Hi,
Just look for 5 year warranty and enjoy.


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## FinneousPJ (Jan 5, 2021)

I don't know if it's a standard mathematical model like MTBF but most probably it's a probabilistic model that's used to arrive at the TBW number such that a certain proportion of units will survive at least that many writes.


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## Zach_01 (Jan 6, 2021)

When/if TBW is reached or close to it the drive will start to loose performance significantly. After that everything could happen but a lot of them keep working a lot more, if nothing else goes wrong.
Today's SSD drives die from different reasons than reaching TBW. The controller is the most common reason and/or its own power supply.
Keep them as cool as possible (especially NVMe), within reason and hope for the best.

Dont fill its space too much.
The one for OS keep it under 60% and those for simple storage under 75~80%.


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## Palladium (Jan 9, 2021)

My 6 year old Crucial M550 1TB: 17TB writes, 99% remaining life. I doubt I would even see it drop to 98% before I finally go full NVMe on my next major upgrade.

I have never seen a failed SSD for any reason yet for the past 7 years, either at home or at my work as a site sysadmin, on the other hand I need at least 30 fingers to count failed HDDs I saw personally in this period.

Even the much maligned 840 Evo is still kicking fine after I gave away the 240GB one to a coworker for his home PC.


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## dragontamer5788 (Jan 9, 2021)

Caring1 said:


> "does it mean my SSD will die afterwards?"
> 
> Yes, nothing lasts forever.



Well, it might die before.

The important thing about TBW is that its the manufacturer's *expectation* of when your SSD will die.



Palladium said:


> My 6 year old Crucial M550 1TB: 17TB writes, 99% remaining life. I doubt I would even see it drop to 98% before I finally go full NVMe on my next major upgrade.
> 
> I have never seen a failed SSD for any reason yet for the past 7 years, either at home or at my work as a site sysadmin, on the other hand I need at least 30 fingers to count failed HDDs I saw personally in this period.
> 
> Even the much maligned 840 Evo is still kicking fine after I gave away the 240GB one to a coworker for his home PC.



That's an MLC drive (2-bits per cell). The current trend is to offer more fragile TLC (3-bits per cell) or even QLC (4-bits per cell) drives (cheaper to make, but more fragile / lower TBW ratings). There was a big story a few years ago about how MLC drives basically last forever, so moving to TLC should be safe.

It should be noted that WiFi ax is something like 10-bits per message (aka: 1024-QAM). SSDs are still a new medium of storage: everyone's wondering how far we can push it before it is no longer practical to use. Of course, when WiFi messes up, they just resend the message (also, TCP resends messages when things are messed up). You can't do that with storage, so storage needs to be treated more carefully.

QLC seems like the safe limit for current technology, maybe a little bit beyond the safe limit. I personally will prefer TLC until we have more tests on QLC drives.


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## Zach_01 (Jan 9, 2021)

For now(Today) MLC is expensive and somewhat unnecessary expense, except maybe a few cases. TLC is pretty  much ok for OS drive and QLC for general storage that doesn’t swap data regularly. To be on the safe side that is...


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## Night (Feb 1, 2021)

Had to install Samsung Magician to check the write amount for my 840 EVO, reports 27.9 TB written since 2013 and good health, it's used as OS drive. HWiNFO reports 92% health. According to the specifications, MTBF for this drive is 1,500,000 hours which equals to 171 years, so I wouldn't rely on MTBF as a measurement, check for amount of terrabytes written.


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## Hardcore Games (Feb 3, 2021)

At 12,901 power on hours, my Intel 660p QLC SSD is showing 94% of its rating remaining.
At 9892 power on hours my Team Lite L5 TLC SSD is showing 100% rating

QLC are less durable but I am not worried as I have backups on hard disk and then i back up to BD for extra insurance.


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## RJARRRPCGP (Feb 3, 2021)

I've seen SSDs that are terrible=PNY CS900 causing SFC in Windows 10 to fail and its SMART reporting failure, when it was hardly used!
A Patriot Pyro that caused a random Windows file error to be logged in the event log. Also major lagging, IIRC! I seem to not have as good luck with SSDs as Palladium.


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## Hachi_Roku256563 (Feb 3, 2021)

Hardcore Games said:


> At 12,901 power on hours, my Intel 660p QLC SSD is showing 94% of its rating remaining.


how do you find out its rating


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## Zach_01 (Feb 3, 2021)

Isaac` said:


> how do you find out its rating


A couple of ways...


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## londiste (Feb 3, 2021)

There have been some SSD endurance tests that run the drives to their deaths. It takes a while and drives usually last well part their TBW rating.








						The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead
					

I never thought this whole tech journalism gig would turn me into a mass murderer. Yet here I am, with the blood of six SSDs on my hands, and that’s...




					techreport.com
				











						SSD-Langzeittest beendet: Exitus bei 9,1 Petabyte
					

Am 23. Juni 2016 starteten wir einen SSD-Langzeittest, um zu ermitteln, wie lange die schnellen Flash-Laufwerke wirklich halten. Fast auf den Tag genau ein Jahr später hat sich das letzte Laufwerk verabschiedet – nach 9,1 PByte an geschriebenen Daten.




					www.heise.de
				




Especially from TechReport story, *how* exactly the drive failure will end up happening is not the same. It can simply stop working when it is dead, it may stop writes and allow you to copy existing data off or anything in between


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## Solid State Soul ( SSS ) (Feb 4, 2021)

dragontamer5788 said:


> I personally will prefer TLC until we have more tests on QLC drives.


Intel's 660p and 665P are one of the best selling SSDs, they both are QLC, and nobody have complaints about their endurance, i guess nand technology have matured enough where the difference is mostly performance than endurance


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## oobymach (Feb 4, 2021)

londiste said:


> There have been some SSD endurance tests that run the drives to their deaths. It takes a while and drives usually last well part their TBW rating.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Some last for petabytes of writes, some die randomly out of nowhere, usually they go into read only mode when write life is over, not always. Failures can be in the onboard ram, memory controller, the write space, it's man made technology so it's sometimes a crap shoot whether it works or not.

Bad products are released publicly all the time, DOA's or lithium ion batteries that catch fire and take the laptop/phone with them, untested hardware is thrown at consumers continuously, ssd's are no different. Read reviews, and wait a couple months after release to buy something, consumers today are basically paying to beta test new products.


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## newtekie1 (Feb 4, 2021)

Solid State Soul ( SSS ) said:


> Intel's 660p and 665P are one of the best selling SSDs, they both are QLC, and nobody have complaints about their endurance, i guess nand technology have matured enough where the difference is mostly performance than endurance



Or people just drastically over-estimate how much data they write to their SSDs. My 512GB NVMe SSD has been powered on continuously as the system drive in my main computer for well over a year now(9977 hours to be exact). I've only written a total of just over 6TB to the drive. The 660p has an expected lifespan of 100TBW.  I've got another 15 years of use at this rate before I hit 100TBW.  And the drive I actually have has an expected lifespan of 320TBW, I'll have replaced the SSD long before I even come close to that.


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## thesmokingman (Feb 4, 2021)

Primordiarch said:


> I still don't get what TBW means. I have looked up google and to my knowledge, endurance is all about warranty.


Start backing it up. It may die or it may not, either way you don't wanna be caught with your pants down when it does.


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## TheLostSwede (Feb 4, 2021)

Solid State Soul ( SSS ) said:


> Intel's 660p and 665P are one of the best selling SSDs, they both are QLC, and nobody have complaints about their endurance, i guess nand technology have matured enough where the difference is mostly performance than endurance


As I said in a different thread, no-one's complaining because most people don't write 80GB+ a day to their drives. Unless you do, they'll work just fine well past the warranty dates.


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## khanhamza (Feb 4, 2021)

"does it mean my SSD will die afterwards?"

Yes, nothing lasts forever. Thank You!


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## RJARRRPCGP (Feb 4, 2021)

Looks like I need to backup! The Crucial MX500, looks faulty to me!

October, 2020:




Today:


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## ThrashZone (Feb 4, 2021)

Hi,
Dang guessing you've already contacted crucial support ?


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## freeagent (Feb 4, 2021)

I had a Crucial M4 256 just stop working with 96% life left. If it wants to die you cant make it stay


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## Zach_01 (Feb 4, 2021)

Many reasons exist for a drive to “die”.
TBW is only one of them. Controller and it’s power supply/feed system are others...


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## ThrashZone (Feb 4, 2021)

Hi,
MX is an old line BX is a little newer.
My first ssd's were mx100's still working 5-6 years ago

One mx100 256gb linux mint 17 killed it by never running trim and it filled up and died
Crucial sent a refurbished as replacement, kind of the pissy thing about crucial they don't sent new replacements but it still works think I have win-10 on them benchmark ssd since I don't use 10 all that much.


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## jaggerwild (Feb 4, 2021)

Primordiarch said:


> I still don't get what TBW means. I have looked up google and to my knowledge, endurance is all about warranty.


Throw back Wednesday=TBW lolz!


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## newtekie1 (Feb 4, 2021)

ThrashZone said:


> MX is an old line BX is a little newer.



Nope.

BX is their economy drives MX is their higher end drives.  The MX500 and BX500 series drives came out right around the same time(the MX500 might be a couple months older).


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## RJARRRPCGP (Feb 4, 2021)

I don't like it how the reported percentage is plunging just from game videos, and possibly just Windows CUs!

Based on a calculation I did weeks ago, I would be lucky to get 5 years out of it before it fails. Looks likely that it's sub-5-years now! Looks like many spinners are more reliable than this SSD!


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## freeagent (Feb 4, 2021)

RJARRRPCGP said:


> I don't like it how the reported percentage is plunging just from game videos, and possibly just Windows CUs!
> 
> Based on a calculation I did weeks ago, I would be lucky to get 5 years out of it before it fails. Looks likely that it's sub-5-years now! Looks like many spinners are more reliable than this SSD!


That's ok, 5 year warranty comes in handy


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## ThrashZone (Feb 4, 2021)

Hi,
Here's the mx100 256gb refurbished replacement still kicking
I'll post the other mx100 256gb and add it to the this post it's an original but on a very old acer socket 775 with Q9550 so sata is a lot slower


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## newtekie1 (Feb 4, 2021)

RJARRRPCGP said:


> I don't like it how the reported percentage is plunging just from game videos, and possibly just Windows CUs!
> 
> Based on a calculation I did weeks ago, I would be lucky to get 5 years out of it before it fails. Looks likely that it's sub-5-years now! Looks like many spinners are more reliable than this SSD!



The CrystalDiskInfo health percentage is 100% bullplop and no one should be looking at it.


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## Zach_01 (Feb 4, 2021)

newtekie1 said:


> The CrystalDiskInfo health percentage is 100% bullplop and no one should be looking at it.


Care to elaborate?


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## newtekie1 (Feb 5, 2021)

Zach_01 said:


> Care to elaborate?



It's based on nothing. It is as far as I'm concerned a made up number.

The important stats on SSD are, TBW vs. rated TBW and Unused Reserve NAND Blocks.  Those are the only real things that will tell you the life of an SSD.

Yest Crystaldiskinfo will rate a drive at 80% or lower when the TBW isn't even 5% of the drives rated TBW, and the drive hasn't used a single reserve NAND blocks.  So you have to ask, what is that number even based on if not the actual life statistics of the drive?


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## AsRock (Feb 5, 2021)

Hardcore Games said:


> At 12,901 power on hours, my Intel 660p QLC SSD is showing 94% of its rating remaining.
> At 9892 power on hours my Team Lite L5 TLC SSD is showing 100% rating
> 
> QLC are less durable but I am not worried as I have backups on hard disk and then i back up to BD for extra insurance.



Same company as who make the Team Dark L3 drives ?, as mines been all over the place for a hell long time now.


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## Vendor (Feb 5, 2021)

RJARRRPCGP said:


> Looks like I need to backup! The Crucial MX500, looks faulty to me!


good health. then what's wrong? seems fine, values don't matter much unless it's showing yellow


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## RJARRRPCGP (Feb 5, 2021)

Here's the Samsung 970 Pro NVME SSD!


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