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5 SSD Frequently Asked Questions Answered — Part 1
There are a lot of people with a lot of Solid-State Drive (SSD) questions looking for answers. Here are answers to 5 of those frequently asked questions.
I have answered a lot of questions about SSDs over the years and there are a number of common questions that keep coming up. So I thought it would be helpful if I put these questions and my answers together and publish them in a series of articles.
1. What’s the lifespan of an SSD?
There’s a general expectation that hard disk drives (HDD) can and will fail because it’s mechanical. It’s therefore natural to assume that SSDs will last forever because it has no moving parts.
Unfortunately, that’s not correct. Flash memory, the technology that’s at the heart of SSDs, can also wear out and fail with use.
As explained in Fact 1 of 3 Things You Should Know About SSDs, existing data that’s in flash memory cannot be overwritten directly.
Occupied memory locations must first be erased in order to unlock the silicon gates. Only when that’s complete can it lock the new data in to finalise the erase and write cycle.
Unfortunately, each silicon gate can only handle a finite number of those cycles before it wears out. And when this happens, the SSD begins to fail.
On the positive side, however, read operations have no effect on silicon gate wear and the data remains intact even when the power is switched off.
Manufacturers specify the lifespan of an SSD in terms of terabytes written (TBW) and most SSDs are rated for approximately 600 TBW.
To put this in context, for a 1 TB SSD with 600 TBW, a typical user can expect the drive to last (on average) 5 years based on daily write volumes of around 336 GB/day.
2. Will replacing my HDD with an SSD make the computer perform faster?
This is not a simple question to answer because it depends on a number of factors. But in most instances, replacing your old HDD with an SSD should give your computer a performance boost.
