Does Having Computer Running Idle Impact Solid-State Drive's Life Expectancy?

Solution 1:

The main thing that shortens the life of a SSD is writing to it. Modern SSDs like yours have rather high life expectancies. The amount of write cycles a SSD can endure is not a fixed value, but manufacturers try to keep this low using various techniques. In your example, you can see that even though your computer wrote 181GB to the drive, the advanced wear-levelling technique and compression made it only write 131GB to the actual NAND (storage) cells - basically every cell on your SSD has only been written to once and some have received two writes. Typical cell endurance is between 100 (very low) and 10000 (quite good).

You will see in this article that others have put a similar SSD under a much higher workload and yet the S.M.A.R.T. data didn't even show 1 percent usage. So, effectively, if you continue to use your SSD like in the last 2 weeks for the next year, you will hit the usage rate like they tested in the article, and you won't even have used 1% of your SSD life expectancy.

Just having your SSD connected to power will also shorten the life of your SSD, but absolutely negligibly so (think 1 million times less than writing to it).