Tells stories of yer old.
I’d love to know if you have used SSDs to death or just still keep using them after all these years.
I can only talk about this:
My brother got a Samsung Evo 830 60GB bootdrive in 2012 for Windows 7. Then he upgraded to a bigger one and the old one I put into my Netbook in 2014. There it served as a Swap / page disk for both Windows and Linux with frequent writes as that Netbook only had 2GB of RAM.
Then I used it as a read cache for a Gigabit speed NAS for years. And it’s still alive! It kept dropping out on the NAS though presumably as my SATA to USB controller didn’t like longterm use I presume.
I will start using it again at least as a boot drive once I moved to more dense drived and have free SATA ports again.
I don’t know its current Power on Hours or TBW sadly and I can’t check right now.
Some old arse OCZ [ca. 2010]. Used W7, for upteen years… It still operates fine
Will have Kubuntu wiped, to give pFsense a go, once Quad-Gb Eth comes in
Samsung 830 256GB I got for Xmas in 2011. Was in my laptop until 2014, then my desktop until 2018, then boot drive in my NAS, and finally moved into my Dad’s laptop last year. Still shows ~90% health.
My first SSD was an Intel 520 series 60 GB. I got it with a laptop I bought in 2012. I was stunned at its speed (reading benchmarks on paper failed to convey just how much faster it was), and I used it to sell my friends on SSDs. I remember spiking it on the ground a couple times just to show off how much better it was than an HDD, that it could take a beating and still boot just fine.
That laptop was my daily driver for 4 years, though I did use it off and on after I got a new laptop in 2016.
That SSD survived many OS installs, distrohopping and switching between Linux and Windows several times.
I finally killed it when I DBAN’d it a couple years ago in preparation to sell the laptop for parts. (I don’t trust secure erase implementations on older SSDs.)
It’s incredible how far things have come since then.
First SSD was a Crucial M4 that started losing data but never reported any errors. One Samsung 840 EVO and one Samsung 950 Pro that the controllers seem to have died on. The last one I owned was a Western Digital SN750 that caused the PCIe root complex to constantly throw WHEA errors because the drive had signal integrity issues.
My current drive is a 1.92TB Kioxia KXD51LN11T92. It doesn’t appear to have any issues.
Wow. Seems like it was solid and all the SSD wear scare was for nothing back then. I can see why an SSD engineer would have pulled their hair back then xD
I stopped using my first SSD 2 years ago. It was a 128 GB Adata drive bought in 2015. It was used as boot drive for daily driver for 7 years. I replaced it only due to space constraints. 128 GB was simply not enough anymore.
It sits now in a box, waiting to be used again
All other machines in the house use >=256 GB drives now.
I thought of that. But the enclosure would be worth more than the drive.
I don’t really move files around. My external HDDs are just backups. Several years old backups. From machines that no longer exist.
It’s interesting how I find this in the category as ‘remember your first graphics card’. they both were definitely times with a before and after.
I still have my first two, though they both are in the ‘death’ category.
Samsung 840, win 7 cloned very particularly to be careful to have the 4k sectors aligned (and which probably didn’t really matter). reused, after into a mac mini, eventually failed going up to 8 years of power on most of the time. The second a 2015-era nvme, death by aftermarket heatsink (which it turned out adhered to the controller, more strongly its solder adhered it to the PCB).
the replacement to that (in the mini), however - was certainly a dog (dramless). I guess that happens when you buy from a consumer market segment, which didn’t I think really apply to any ssd initially. They’ve come on so much better - but also so much worse.
Got one with a 128GB NVMe for a portable Linux machine anywhere I go. Works brilliantly if my installed OS ever goes down and I need to adjust / repair something.
Not really much of a story. I got frustrated with how long it took Windows to load from my 2TB WD Black from like 2011, so in 2014 I bought a 1TB i think it was a Samsung 840 EVO SATA drive for £300. That’s still in my system. I then acquired another 840 EVO (512GB) from my dad who had it in a laptop he was getting rid of. Then I got a 256GB m.2. I couldn’t use it as a boot drive on my (Sandy Bridge) system, so I installed some games on it. It became my boot drive when I moved to Ryzen. That’s still there. When I started messing around with video editing I needed a bigger SSD, I was reading and writing from a mechanical drive which was just painful. I bought… I think it was a Samsung 2TB 980 Pro m.2 SSD? That’s still in my system.
So yeah. I don’t really get rid of hardware if I can help it and so far none of my drives have died; I still have that original 2TB mechanical drive in there.
Those old, old MLC drives with Marvell or other good controllers are real tanks. If you can get a 970Pro samsung drive, the numbers they’re rated for should make them even better.
I have a 128GB SSD I got in 2012, used for boot until probably 2016 or so, and kept on using in various systems to today. It still works fine, though I suspect it doesn’t like being powered off for long periods anymore.
Snap. My first was a 64GB Kingston SSDNow V Series SSD in 2009.
It has been used almost continuously for 13 years to run MacOS, Ubuntu, Swap, Windows, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and is currently running Linux Mint Debian Edition. I never fill it beyond 80% and always set noatime in the mount options to reduce wear and prolong life. Seems to have worked as it’s still chugging along.
It’s a SATA2 with 200/110MBps R/W speeds which — while quite slow compared to modern drives — is still fast enough to operate without any gnashing of teeth.
I have bought well over a dozen SSDs over the years. Various capacities, brands and models. Both 2.5" and 2280 form factors. Never had a single failure or problem with any of them — even though many have been worked very, very hard. Have been particularly impressed with the Samsung PROs and EVOs. Currently have more 1TB 970 EVO Plus M.2 SSDs than anything else.
Have been free of spinning rust since late 2010 and will never go back.
I have a 128GB SSD that is a Corsair Performance 3 that I bout off ebay around 2010, maybe longer? It was already old by the time I bought it.
It’s been a boot drive now for many years. At one time it was running Win 7, Then 10. I skipped 8. Now it’s running my Linux install, Pop-OS.
All the while it’s been running almost 24/7 give or take with the occasional power outage, hardware install, etc.
And all SMART data says it’s in good condition, so I don’t know when it’s gonna die.
It’s survived a house fire, spille drinks, young kids, the works. I though these things were supposed to have a short use life? But i have yet to see this thing truely die.
The 2013 Samsung 840 256G in my TrueNAS box has 76954 power-on hours. I have another one in my Ubuntu server at 61934.
Only issues I’ve ever had with SSDs were the 850 EVOs that would slow down as time went on, there was a big thread on it on overclockers.net(?) in like 2015. I have a 512 and 1TB version, both of which showed this problem, which Samsung ultimately fixed, after several false starts, via firmware upgrades. Those drives are still in service, haven’t checked their smart data in ages.
The 970 Pro 1TB in this workstation has a mere 13485 hours and 40.2 TB writes. It may only be a baby, but it keeps on tickin’…
