Solid State Drive (SSD) lifespan

[silenttigercd 863]

I've had an SSD in my laptop for three years and put another one in my pc a few weeks ago. 

I've read that the life span of them isn't that great and is based on write cycles. The drive in my laptop is only 128gb and I've downloaded lots of shit, installed and uninstalled games etc. so I'm concerned about the lifespan. 

Has anyone had one die on them? Are there ways to predict when it will die? Is there a gradual decline in performance or does it just suddenly die? 

[Squirrel 5,180]

How long is a piece of string?

It's relatively new technology so accurate lifespans haven't been recorded across a full range of drives. As it's per use rather than time it's also another factor to consider when estimating life span. There's an interesting article here discussing the lifetime of various SSD's but you should be safe while using your PC/Laptop normally. If possible have a secondary conventional drive to store the data which will change a lot such as video & music files and day to day documents leaving your SSD to look after program installations and other files which don't move over a period of time. 

[furdog 525]

From what I know, you should not have any problems with current SSDs over the life of your computer. I think age has more to do with them failing rather than hitting their theoretical read/write limits. Not sure if this is how they still work but they used to fail in stages and the internal controllers and software would compensate for this causing the drive capacity would shrink over time (not really noticeable). A lot of the earlier drives would have controller failures more than actuall read/write failures. So, in general you should not have any more worries about modern SSDs than you would any spinny disk in regards to failure.

Edited June 1, 2016 by furdog
Words for clarity.