this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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SSD lifespans aren't measured in years. You can have one living for decades and still function fine, due to the lack of any moving parts in the technology. SSD's degrade due to constant writing and rewriting data to its storage cells. In other words, the more you use it, the more it dies. Manufacturers usually list out the minimum terabytes of writes (TBW) that their SSD's are rated to be able to handle. It's usually in the ballpark of 300 to 600 TBW. Note that this is just the rated minimum, so your SSD is supposed to last longer than the minimum TBW.
You should check out CrystalDiskInfo. It'll tell you how many TBW are currently on the SSD. As for how long the SSD lasts, you'll need to check for the manufacturer's specifications for your particular model of SSD. If you can't find the manufacturer's specifications, knowing the current amount of writes will at least still give you a general ballpark of its remaining lifespan (ie, 20 TBW = still pretty new, no worries here; 500 TBW = I wouldn't rely on this SSD to live very long)
In general, though, 5 years of normal usage isn't very long. I think there's probably still plenty of life in that SSD, unless you spent those 5 years constantly downloading movies or something
Thanks for the information. My system is running Linux, so I can't use CrystalDiskInfo. Do you know what's a good alternative for Linux? I guess
smartctl
might work.