Predict your SSD life expectancy with SSDLife

Last Updated on October 15, 2016 by Dave Farquhar

Here’s a great tool: SSDLife. It helps you predict SSD life expectancy.

Back in the bad old days of hard drives with magnetic platters, you could only speculate about their life expectancy. With SSDs, life expectancy is a lot more predictable, and that’s what this tool does.

I used it to learn that I worked my first SSD harder than I should. But reading the comments, it seems a firmware upgrade helps life expectancy sometimes–probably they’ve tweaked the wear leveling. Mine’s not dangerously low; the stats suggest I have 6-12 months before I wear the drive out if I don’t change my ways. And a firmware upgrade could help that; I’m running on a very early revision. I also verified my system settings with SSDTweak to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. For all I knew I could have forgotten to turn off the last file access registry setting.

But truth be told, it was just a 32 gig drive. I outgrew it before it was able to fail.

Newer SSDs last longer. I several SSDs that are around five years old and still going strong. The general rule of thumb with a drive you buy today is 5-10 years. My personal experience has done nothing to refute that.

SSDlife doesn’t work with all drives, but if it doesn’t work with yours, chances are your manufacturer has a utility that has the same functionality. I recommend you download a tool and run it once in a while just to make sure you aren’t on borrowed time.

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