# SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HALU-000H1 512,1 GB | Time of life



## jevolution (Nov 20, 2021)

A few months ago I bought a gaming laptop and it came with a SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HALU-000H1 512.1 GB NVM Express 1.3 SSD

I use crystaldiskinfo to know the status and it already marks 96% for me. I would like to know how long is the lifespan of this SSD. I understand that an SSD is not highly recommended for gaming despite its speed, I would like to have an idea of when it can fail.

I leave the data for crystaldiskinfo:

Total Host Reads: 26204 GB.

Total Host Writes: 22184 GB.

Power On Count: 696 count.

Power On Hours: 1616 hours.

Health Status: Good 96%.


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## Nike_486DX (Nov 20, 2021)

Is it the only drive in ur laptop? 96% looks ok to me, 4% would be equal to 22.2TB (~ 22184 gb host writes), which would mean 100% is about 550TBW.  Cant find any tbw info on that ssd tho (its a samsung PM991 right?)


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## jevolution (Nov 20, 2021)

Nike_486DX said:


> Is it the only drive in ur laptop? 96% looks ok to me, 4% would be equal to 22.2TB (~ 22184 gb host writes), which would mean 100% is about 550TBW.  Cant find any tbw info on that ssd tho (its a samsung PM991 right?)





Spoiler: Is this my friend:










A few weeks ago I bought a 1TB 5200 rpm HDD, so I don't load the SSD so much haha


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## Toothless (Nov 20, 2021)

You're not going to know when it fails. My 970 EVO is past the 300TBW mark and still going strong. 

Who said they're not good for games? That's a load of crack as many people are moving to them for the loading times. They're great for games minus the cost/space given.


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## jevolution (Nov 20, 2021)

Toothless said:


> You're not going to know when it fails. My 970 EVO is past the 300TBW mark and still going strong.
> 
> Who said they're not good for games? That's a load of crack as many people are moving to them for the loading times. They're great for games minus the cost/space given.


I said it because they degrade a lot, especially with games of more than 100gb. It is what they have told me.

Thanks for the info anyway, I'll keep it in mind 

Friends, in order not to create another thread, I have a new query.

For a 512 SSD like this, how much free space is it recommended to leave?


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## chrcoluk (Nov 20, 2021)

Toothless said:


> You're not going to know when it fails. My 970 EVO is past the 300TBW mark and still going strong.
> 
> Who said they're not good for games? That's a load of crack as many people are moving to them for the loading times. They're great for games minus the cost/space given.


Curious how you got it that high lol.

My 850 pro which is probably easily my most used SSD, is over 5 years old, had 1 year in a console as well (which auto records footage), and its still nowhere near that. 

For the OP they seem to have heavier than average writes as well 22TB in a few months is very high.

Absolutely use SSD for gaming OP.


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## Toothless (Nov 20, 2021)

jevolution said:


> I said it because they degrade a lot, especially with games of more than 100gb. It is what they have told me.
> 
> Thanks for the info anyway, I'll keep it in mind
> 
> ...


Just use the drive. The more you worry the less you'll enjoy it. You can fill the drive and not have issues at all.



chrcoluk said:


> Curious how you got it that high lol.
> 
> My 850 pro which is probably easily my most used SSD, is over 5 years old, had 1 year in a console as well (which auto records footage), and its still nowhere near that.
> 
> ...


I had a LiteOn ssd hit about 467TBW before dying. A game launcher had a bug that no one seemed to care about that would write gigabytes per day of crash logs, but overwrite so it didn't take space.


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## Dr. Dro (Nov 20, 2021)

Don't worry, that drive has a very long life ahead of it my friend... just enjoy it. I have an Intel 320 drive that has been in every build I've had since 2011... think about that, it's been with me for a decade, I consider it a good luck charm for my computers at this point. 





Back when this drive was new, it was not uncommon to see lengthy forum arguments over NAND lifespan, and today it's finally possible to pass the final judgment - the side that refused to buy SSDs back then kinda just ended up missing out on awesome performance over a concern that probably didn't matter to most people back then.


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## Nike_486DX (Nov 20, 2021)

Dr. Dro said:


> Don't worry, that drive has a very long life ahead of it my friend... just enjoy it. I have an Intel 320 drive that has been in every build I've had since 2011... think about that, it's been with me for a decade, I consider it a good luck charm for my computers at this point.
> 
> View attachment 225951
> 
> Back when this drive was new, it was not uncommon to see lengthy forum arguments over NAND lifespan, and today it's finally possible to pass the final judgment - the side that refused to buy SSDs back then kinda just ended up missing out on awesome performance over a concern that probably didn't matter to most people back then.


There is also 3d Xpoint tech, which is superior to normal flash-based ssds. And no, NAND longevity has always been a matter of luck, i have experienced 3 ssd failures in the past, a crucial bx300 128gb (failed after 3 months with just ~2340 gb writes, the data was lost), a WD Green 240gb (failed after 4 days, had to RMA, the data was lost), and a Kingston UV300 240GB (used in a laptop, suddenly died after 4 years and the data was lost). The first 2 were showing 100% health prior to their demise lolll. The kingston died at 96%.  But these were low-end ssds, this is why i dont brag that much about it.


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## jevolution (Nov 20, 2021)

Thank you for your help my brothers, thank you very much.


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## Dr. Dro (Nov 20, 2021)

Nike_486DX said:


> There is also 3d Xpoint tech, which is superior to normal flash-based ssds. And no, NAND longevity has always been a matter of luck, i have experienced 3 ssd failures in the past, a crucial bx300 128gb (failed after 3 months with just ~2340 gb writes, the data was lost), a WD Green 240gb (failed after 4 days, had to RMA, the data was lost), and a Kingston UV300 240GB (used in a laptop, suddenly died after 4 years and the data was lost). The first 2 were showing 100% health prior to their demise lolll. The kingston died at 96%.  But these were low-end ssds, this is why i dont brag that much about it.



I mean, that's an outlier (defective hardware, in your case), the endurance is the result of a combination of factors (NAND layer count and type, bits per cell stored, lithography, etc.). The earliest enthusiast-grade SSDs I can recall, the Intel X25-E series that released alongside Nehalem in 2008 used 50 nm SLC, while their capacities were very small and the price very high (32 and 64 GB), the 64 GB model has an endurance rating of 2 PBW. That's hilariously overkill, and made for some of the most resilient drives ever made, which were only matched briefly by enterprise grade MLC drives of higher capacity.

Nowadays there are many mechanisms to improve both speed, endurance and reliability (wear leveling algorithms, operating the TLC or QLC NAND in SLC mode for caching, etc.), that even a very cheap DRAMless TLC drive (think bottom of the barrel drives known for their reliablity... or lack thereof, like the Kingston A400) should deal with most daily workloads reasonably enough. I have an earlier make A400 120GB that I paid the equivalent of 19 USD for years ago with ~6.7 TB writes that's still at 88% health.





I understand where you're coming from, though. I've had a 240 GB PNY drive here that essentially bricked itself (showed 8 MB capacity and refused any further writes), but that's not the norm.


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## chrcoluk (Nov 21, 2021)

Toothless said:


> Just use the drive. The more you worry the less you'll enjoy it. You can fill the drive and not have issues at all.
> 
> 
> I had a LiteOn ssd hit about 467TBW before dying. A game launcher had a bug that no one seemed to care about that would write gigabytes per day of crash logs, but overwrite so it didn't take space.


Well I did forget I made some effort to reduce writes, e.g. steam by default writes a game twice when downloading, one of them forced to the C: drive (I symliked away to a spindle), also browser temp files on ram disk.  

Just your numbers were an eye opener it was a bit of a wow.

Also no surprise on the game launcher bug, these kind of issues are no longer considered important by developers anymore.


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## Toothless (Nov 22, 2021)

chrcoluk said:


> Well I did forget I made some effort to reduce writes, e.g. steam by default writes a game twice when downloading, one of them forced to the C: drive (I symliked away to a spindle), also browser temp files on ram disk.
> 
> Just your numbers were an eye opener it was a bit of a wow.
> 
> Also no surprise on the game launcher bug, these kind of issues are no longer considered important by developers anymore.


It was a Nexon game. Their launcher had the error logger bug and I was on them until I got compensation for it.


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## Ferrum Master (Nov 22, 2021)

My oldest SSD drive is so old, that it doesn't show host writes , only working hours. I still reside Linux on it... works fine.


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## Dr. Dro (Nov 22, 2021)

Ferrum Master said:


> My oldest SSD drive is so old, that it doesn't show host writes , only working hours. I still reside Linux on it... works fine.



Wow. I wonder if that's because the amount of data written is so high it can no longer keep track of it, or if it doesn't report it due to a firmware bug or limitation. My Intel 320 should be still a tad older (your drive seems to support SATA 3 standard, the controller on mine doesn't as it's something it inherited from its predecessor, the X25-M G2). I also have a Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB drive, it should be about the same vintage as your Crucial M4 (circa 2012), but it was sealed and unused until I bought it off some guy who bought it years back and seemingly forgot about it, so it's been in use since early 2020 really. Interestingly enough this drive doesn't report nearly as much information to the host controller as the Intel drive does.


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## RealKGB (Nov 22, 2021)

Well I WAS going to post my 10-year-old Crucial M4 128GB at 86% life
But it's too old to support total reads/writes so CrystalDiskInfo looks like this:


Spoiler








So here's my 5-month-old Crucial MX500 that's used as a macOS boot drive and was left mostly untouched for 4 out of 5 months:


Spoiler


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## AsRock (Nov 22, 2021)

jevolution said:


> I said it because they degrade a lot, especially with games of more than 100gb. It is what they have told me.
> 
> Thanks for the info anyway, I'll keep it in mind
> 
> ...



It will fail when ever it fails, no real way to know for sure, if your that concerned buy a USB drive and back up.  And as for games if your not deleting stuff from the drives all the time it will last typically longer as it's the writing to the drive that wears them down but that don't mean thing else will not fail though.

EDIT: there is one issue, the tips that games give like when loading you might not get to read them or just part of haha.


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## Blue4130 (Nov 22, 2021)

jevolution said:


> . It is what they have told me.


Who is "they"? I suggest you stop listening to them. They don't know what they are talking about.


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## jevolution (Nov 22, 2021)

Thanks for all the answers you have given me.

Now, which NVME SSD do you recommend for the future?


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## Dr. Dro (Nov 23, 2021)

jevolution said:


> Thanks for all the answers you have given me.
> 
> Now, which NVME SSD do you recommend for the future?



The best ones to get right now are the WD Black SN850, the Kingston KC3000, the Samsung 980/980 Pro and the ADATA XPG Gammix S70, but these drives are not cheap. You probably can afford them, but they're overkill unless you're running the latest platforms out there. You didn't fill your system specs, so it's a bit hard to know what you're running precisely.

I'm rocking a XPG Spectrix S40G 512GB as my main boot drive, this drive performs reasonably well for an earlier generation PCI Express 3.0 model, I plan on knocking it down to my secondary NVMe slot and buying either an S70 or a SN850 for my 4.0 slot sometime soon. I've been stalling because right now I can live with the amount of storage that I have, so it's sensible to let the tech advance a bit in my particular case.


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