16-year-old SATA II SSD survives 1 petabyte of writes, 25x the drive's rating
Key takeaways
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- The NAND in SSDs gradually degrades over time as you write or erase data, similar to the wear and tear your car or virtually any other electronic device in your house experiences.
- However, there is a common misconception that when SSD exceeds its TBW rating, it will immediately stop working or become unusable.
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(Image credit: Getty Images) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 6 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Everything in life has an expiry date, and that holds true even for the best SSDs on the market. A fascinating experiment conducted by the You Tube channel Wolfy Tech shows that SSDs are more durable than we think, even if they were released 16 years ago. Over the course of the experiment, the channel wrote one petabyte of data to the drive, and the SSD, despite having over 60,000 hours of power-on time, continues to function and shows no signs of catastrophic failure.
The NAND in SSDs gradually degrades over time as you write or erase data, similar to the wear and tear your car or virtually any other electronic device in your house experiences. Just as cars come with a manufacturer s warranty defined by either years of use or a certain number of miles, whichever comes first, SSDs also come with a warranty defined by either years of use or a metric known as TBW (Terabytes Written).