SSDLife Free–Calculates Your SSD’s Life Expectancy

Published on November 6, 2011 By DrJBHL In Personal Computing

It’s a neat little free app (1.5 MB) which will tell you given your usage stats, brand and make of SSD when it will be likely to fail. That’s not a guarantee, but if you have an early make and model SSD, you might want to find out and make plans around that rather than one bright day, poof and you’re running around like a crazy person, hunting and posting “What kind should I get?” Forum posts. SSDs from the very beginning have stories about bad life expectancy and locked storage. Remember? The first retail generation of solid state drives had lots of issues in this regard. The newer SSD’s really don’t have those issues, but some folks might wish to test and see their disk health, performance and reliability.

SSDLife Free is a Windows software program that can check the life expectancy of a solid state drive. It interprets the SMART data of the drive. The free version of the program supports only one connected SSD. If more than one drives are connected only the first will be analyzed and displayed. - gHacks

You install, and it gathers SMART and TRIM data (depending on the SSD’s age and make). You can learn exactly how the Life Expectancy is calculated here: http://ssd-life.com/eng/how.html

As more data is written, the disk becomes more accurate in calculating it’s life expectancy (the software just collects and displays it on its interface.

The deluxe/full version costs $19, and might be worth it for folks with more than one SSD. The free version as I said will only show the first SSD it encounters.

Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2011/11/05/ssdlife-free-show-life-expectancy-of-solid-state-drives/?_m=3n%2e0038%2e330%2ehj0ao01hy5%2ec17

Download link: http://ssd-life.com/index.html

Comments

jshores

on Nov 06, 2011

Looks like a great tool, but will not work for me since I run 4 SSDs in a raid 0.

Heavenfall

on Nov 06, 2011

Interesting, I only have one ssd. I'll run it for a week or two and see what the software estimates.

Starcandy

on Nov 06, 2011

Been using this pretty much since I got my SSD. Nice little program.

RedneckDude

on Nov 06, 2011

I wish I had an SSD..... [e digicons]:'([/e]

eagleyelgae

on Nov 06, 2011

I like this one, thanks for the heads up.

Heavenfall

on Nov 06, 2011

It is curious that so many are getting 2020 estimates. I can only assume that this is an estimate for a mechanical failure of some sort, rather than when the drive reaches the maximum writes. Of course, SSDs shouldn't have mechanical failures in the same sense as other drives.

I usually write around half my drive every day, so assuming that it should be capable of writing around 10 000 times that should give me a life-time of less than 30 years. So there's definitely some other value which causes a failure that happens before that.

DrJBHL

on Nov 06, 2011

jshores

reply 1

Looks like a great tool, but will not work for me since I run 4 SSDs in a raid 0.

Then get the pro version. $19 isn't a whole heck of a lot.

Jafo

on Nov 06, 2011

Handy proggy....

Most curious info though.... 'Powered on 65 times'.....

....in 2 years, 6 days and 18 hours....

VistArtXPosed

on Nov 06, 2011

*runs SSDLife*

I'm skeptical whether my OCZ Vertex 2 is really gonna last 'til July 30, 2020. That's seems a bit unbelievable. It powered on 853 times (I put my computer into Sleep mode a lot), has worked 858 hours (1 month, 5 days, 18 hours) , and is reported to be at 100% Health.

I'll be replacing this SSD WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY before 2020; maybe like next year or something. And by 2020, SSDs will cost close to nothing as newer, faster storage devices will hit the market, or rather, all of our storage will be stored in the cloud, who knows?

Conclusion: It's a neat little app, but I wouldn't pay for it though.

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