That makes it about the same expected lifetime as an HDD
Why is it that writing to flash memory causes damage, but writing to normal DDR memory does no harm?
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That is a great question. No idea on the reply.
I am surprised at a 5 year life expectancy but guess it depends on its use. I have some machines of over 15 years still going strong and they have been fomated, windows to linux ubuntu to puppy to mint and every flavour and version ā¦ yes mechanics can wear but no moving parts on ssd.
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The life of a SSD is probably much longer. Typical home user writing 50 GB per day? I would be surprise a home user write 25 GB per day which would double a 240 GB SSD life to over 10 years.
A 500 GB SSD is rated at 3 times the TBW. So now at 25 GB write per day, we are looking at a disk that will last 30 years!
Updated
My wifeās laptop has a 128 GB SSD installed. From smart data for the SSD.
Power on Hours = 25,949 or about 2.9 years
Percent SSD is Good = 96%
She only does emails and surf the web.
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From the web.
āThe program/erase process causes a deterioration of the oxide layer that traps electrons in a NAND flash memory cell,ā
And of course, DDR memory is volatile and does not retain anything once the power is turned off.
More info;
Why does RAM not have the same issue of limited write cycles that solid state drives do?
The storage in RAM does not involve any physical changes in the semiconductor structure of the device.
For static RAM the storage cells consist of cross coupled transistors where one transistor is turned on and the other is off. Depending on which transistor is on defines whether the bit is a zero or a one.
For dynamic RAM, a capacitor is charged or discharged to store a one or a zero.
In Solid State Drives, unlike dynamic RAM, charge is actually forced into or sucked out of an extremely highly resistive cell. To move charge in or out means defeating the insulation to get the charge moved. This movement of charge through the insulator gradually damages the insulation until eventually it can no longer hold a charge.
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When I get hold of old discarded equipment (sometimes when attending a recycle centre) I re-format the included HDD to FAT32 when used for files (not a Linux distro) and fit them in external USB connected enclosures.
When re-using an old desktop/laptop PC I now always fit a new SSD formatting it to ext4.
October 2025 will be an interesting time when Windoze 10 will no longer be updated and much of the above equipment will be dumped , a unique opportunity to make it a Linux adoption event ā¦but will any average PC user be prepared to learn something (slightly) new ?
I am not holding my breath .
Frank in County Wicklow Ireland
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Hi Frank,
Many years ago, I brought a used desktop off of e-bay. The internal HDD had not been reformatted. Well, I was curious and browsed the disk. The person who had owned this desktop did tax returns. On the disk was the name, address, social security number (in US tax and personal ID) for well over 50 people.
So I reformatted the disk before using it.
Howard in Maryland, USA
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Thats my worry howard, data transfer to someone new.
And for frank i used to do fat 32 but stopped, now i automatically select linux ext, format, then if i know its going in a windows machine (extreamly rare for me, even externally) then reformat again to fat 32. Better safe.
Think all my stock of drives are on linux format and yes there are far too many of them especially the larger size from towers. Mainly get laptops in now.
Every ssd thats come in have been under warranty so its return to seller if hardware errors but its mainly windows and virus issues.
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Why do you consider a reformat to fat32 less safe than to ext?
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I prefer 2.5 inch SATA drives ,but from some old equipment I retain 3.5 inch (SATA)drives which I then put in a 4 channel docking station (not RAID).
Recently I recovered 2 pcs 1TB driveā¦storage galore !
Frank in County Wicklow -Ireland
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You may know about this Frank.
My tower PC has external eSATA ports. I dont think eSATA disks exist today.
Can I use those ports for anything?
They would be much faster than USB connected disks.
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Sorry Neville , I do not have any knowledge of eSATA ports ,although my Dell E6330 laptop (from AD2013) appears to have an eSATA socket . Todate I have only used USB ports.
Regards , Frank in County Wicklow -Ireland
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Badly worded on my part, I erase all data with ext linux format.
Then if a windows client needs a disk external or internal to use with windows then I will reformat again to FAT as windows will not see a linux formatted disk.
Linux will not always see fat 32 disks over a set size.
Double formatting hopefully has a better chance of data removal and harder to get info back. I hope !
An old fashioned low level format on an HDD would be ideal .
I dont know if it exists todayā¦ it remarks all the sectors .
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I agree Neville only issue could then be wear on the drive as discussed before,
I do my best i think
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Hi,
Iām sorry, but Iām still puzzled as to why you canāt do the low level format on SSDs.
Iāve already opened one of my SSDs, to remove the memory and controller reference and look for the datasheets, but at the moment I have little free time. However, I found this information from Intel and I believe that, if there were a problem, Intel would not publish such information, thatās my opinion.
Available Tools to Run a Low-Level Format or Secure Erase on IntelĀ® Optaneā¢ Solid State Drives
Jorge
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I guess itās all about that wearing paranoia: when overwriting data, means also add some wearing.
Iām not so paranoid about wearing, in fact I donāt care for it at all.
I have a working SSD which is over-weared long ago, and still works OK (today itās my ventoy drive so it does not get much more wearing 
).
In the past I had SSD which had 99% life left (predicted on wear level) and died suddenly in a fraction of a second.
Solid drives are subject to failure, just like any ordinary HDD, they just do it in different way, maybe in different rate.
After all, if itās about to discard that SSD, and want no chance that anyone recovers secret data from it, who on earth cares about the health of the SSD?
If Iād resale such an SSD Iād just dd if=/dev/zero to it, then advertise it for sale with that wear.
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Last week thursday I had a visit at a friend, because a disk in his computer was accidentally repartioned and formatted. Family photoalbum lost there. Of course, thereās no backup.
I took a big enough HDD with me (3TB), one of my Sharkoon docks, and my Ventoy drive.
I booted up Debian MATE live on his computer from my Ventoy drive, and dd-ed that drive to a file on my disk.
Something like dd if=/dev/sdb/ of=/mnt/bigdisk/image status=progress
At home I ran photorec for a night on the image, something like
losetup -Prf /media/user/bigdisk/image
Used lsblk to confirm I have the image attached, then ran photorec, instructed it to scan /dev/loop0
In the destination dir I have now recup.dir.1 to recup.dir.109, and there are few thousends of jpegs in those, named like f{long number random number}.jpg.
Today I gave him these results, and I was treated like a hero 
Fortunately itās not my job to reorganize the pictures into albums, but as the exif data are intact, itās not impossible to do itā¦
The lesson: you can format/reformat/repartition multiple times, the data stays. Adminstrative informations will be lost of course, such as file name, creation date, etc. But the data is there until itās physically overwritten.
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That is quite a different thing from a low level format on an HDD. On an HDD it
marks the sector positions on the magnetic surface of the disk.
There is no such thing on an SSD. They should use a different term.
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Wow thats quite a story and bravo for the recovery of the images, I would not have thought that was possible. I have never tried at that level with cli so really impressed.
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Thinking of ssd I guess its the same technology inside a usb memory stick drive and also a camera memory stick, if so we tend not to think about them wearing out. Although I did get donated one a few weeks back and the user said its faulty so I tried nothing would repare it so its going in the bin when I remember.