As you may well know, SSDs have a limited lifespan since there is a write limit to their memory cells. For this, the manufacturers specify the useful life of the SSD with the TBW (Terabytes Written, Terabytes written), but this data, although it can be used to compare magnitudes, does not tell us how long the SSD has. So, in this article we are going to teach you how to calculate the useful life of your SSD easily.
The term TBW (Terabytes Written) is defined by JEDEC as the number of terabytes that can be written to an SSD until its memory cells are “depleted”, and is defined in the JESD218 standard. However, this number has little to do with time to know whether an average SSD will last you 2, 10 or 20 years. Do not despair, because the calculation is quite simple, but there are certain parameters that you must take into account.
The guarantee, a determining factor
To calculate the useful life of an SSD it is necessary to know three parameters, and all three are generally clearly specified in the technical characteristics of a device: on the one hand we need to know its capacity , a fact that is quite obvious, and on the other hand we need to know the TBWs specified by the manufacturer.
The parameter that may be more strange is the guarantee , and is that the “trick” of this is that the manufacturers express the TBW of their SSDs in such a way that they “fit” with the guarantee period, in order to wash their hands giving a guarantee. always lower than the average TBW of the device. In any case, with the guarantee period that is always expressed in years, we already enter the time parameter that will serve us to calculate how long an SSD will last in the equation.
It is a bit of a cheat, but you can see it clearly in the product specifications, and for sample here you have information about Crucial’s warranty policy regarding its MX500 SSDs:
Here it is seen that Crucial offers 3 or 5 years of guarantee depending on the capacity precisely for these reasons that we have explained, and that is that a SSD of greater capacity obviously has more TBW.
How to calculate the lifespan of an SSD
With the three parameters (capacity, TBW and warranty) that we have already explained, knowing what the real durability of an SSD is is very easy to calculate and obeys the following formula.
GB / day = (TBW x 1000) / ((warranty x 365) / 2)
Let’s take as an example a Crucial MX500 SSD with 1 TB capacity. According to the manufacturer, this device supports 360 TBW and has a five-year guarantee, so according to this formula we would have to have a durability of 98 GB written every day for 5 years . Equally, it would also be 49 GB a day every day for 10 years, or 24.5 GB a day for 20 years.
Obviously, the durability or lifespan of an SSD measured at this time should be done in GB written per day for X time, so how much is written per day to an SSD in the normal way? These are the typical magnitudes, which are obviously variable depending on the use of the equipment, the hours it is switched on, etc .:
- Office PC , Internet browsing and multimedia use: between 10 and 35 GB per day.
- PC Gaming : Between 20 and 70 GB a day (varies greatly depending on whether you are installing and uninstalling games very often).
So let’s take a typical gaming PC that writes on average 50 GB a day to its SSD with this Crucial SSD that we are using as an example, and that has 360 TBW and a 5-year warranty. So the formula would be like this:
SSD durability (in days) = ((TBW x 1000) / (GB / day)) x 2
In this case the durability of the SSD would be 3,600 days, or what is the same, 9.86 years of useful life . Even if we made more intensive use of the device and wrote 100 GB / day on it, its durability would be about 5 years.
If you do not want to do calculations, we leave you an online calculator courtesy of WintelGuy.
As you can see, and although the SSDs have an expiration, this is really very wide and unless you make intensive use of the device, it will last a long time without problems.
