How to extend the life of your old SSDs

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SSDs (Solid State Drives) handle data differently than older hard drives. In an HDD, data is written to moving disks using a head, while an SSD stores data in NAND cells, with each cell only able to undergo a certain number of write cycles before it begins to degrade. This means that SSDs have a limited lifespan by default, usually measured in TBW (terabytes written). If you have an 80TB SSD, its lifespan depends on how long it takes you to write 80TB of data to it. If you download or transfer 10 GB of data every day, your SSD will last around 22 years, while using 50 GB per day drops that to just over 4 years.

This doesn’t mean your SSD is sure to die as soon as it runs out of write cycles, but individual NAND cells start to degrade when that happens. Your drive will be more prone to data corruption, it will not perform at full capacity, and the entire SSD may fail at any time.

You can’t extend the life of your SSD beyond its total value, but there are still some things you can do. The easiest way to do this is to do fewer write cycles. If you reduce your downloads or how often you move large files, your SSD will take longer to run out of write cycles. Additionally, just like heat is harmful to your laptop, placing your SSD in extreme temperatures can shorten its lifespan. Managing PC temperatures and not storing your drives in hot environments is another way to keep SSDs healthy.

We’ve explained how each cell in an SSD can only experience a certain number of write cycles before it stops functioning properly. If data were written randomly to different cells or in a sequence, some cells would fail much faster than others, causing the disk to fail before you reached its TBW limit.

To combat this, modern SSDs have a feature called wear leveling. As the name suggests, this levels out the wear on all available cells instead of putting more wear on some of them. Since wear is distributed evenly, no cell dies before the others, giving you a lifespan much closer to the marketed TBW value.

However, the effectiveness of wear leveling depends on how much empty space you have on your drive. On a virtually empty SSD, all data can be distributed among all cells. However, if only 20% of your total storage space is empty, the data has far fewer cells to be divided between. This causes these specific cells to fail more quickly than the ones you use to store files long term. If you want an SSD that lasts a long time, don’t keep the storage constantly filled with large files and programs: consider backing up important files to an external drive and deleting those you no longer need.

Knowing how to care for and maintain your SSD is important, as is knowing how to monitor its health, and the easiest way to get an idea of ​​how long your drive will last is to look up its TBW online. Samsung is one of the largest SSD manufacturers, and its 2TB SSD 990 Pro has a capacity of up to 1,200TB; if you download 650GB of data every day, it will take you 5 years to run out of cycles.

This is useful if you’re buying a new SSD, but if you’ve already had yours for a while, you probably don’t know exactly how much capacity has already been used – and even if you’ve just bought a new one, it helps to regularly monitor its health for signs that your SSD is about to fail.

Fortunately, most modern NVMe SSDs feature SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), which makes it incredibly easy to analyze their health. There are many ways to do this: you can download free third-party software like CrystalDiskInfo, use the manufacturer-specific program (such as Samsung Magician for Samsung drives), or simply open Windows Settings, go to Storage, Advanced Storage Settings, and then click Properties next to your drive. Regardless of which method you use, you will be able to see disk health measured as a percentage.