SSD Life Time reading explanation
Using DriveDX shows 55% SSD Lifetime Left indicator. My iMac is 5 years old so, do I have another 5 years or less?
Thanks.
iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.13
Question marked as
Theoretically yes assuming the same type of usage over the next five years. However, some of the SSD health attributes are just "guidelines" on when the manufacturer expects a drive may start encountering issues. With SSDs, it can be complicated to assess the true health of an SSD since many SSDs today (especially the Apple SSDs) don't contain enough health information to fully assess their health & condition. Some people are still using Apple SSDs which show an out right "SMART Status Failing" message in Disk Utility, yet the SSD is still working perfectly fine. It was a lot easier assessing the health of a hard drive since any "warning" or "failing" notice usually meant problems for a hard drive. SSDs behave differently and the manufacturers unfortunately don't really provide enough health information with SSDs to accurately judge the health of an SSD. At best looking at the health can help alert a user to when potential issues may be occurring or when those issues are more likely to manifest once an attribute reaches 1% (or 0%) with a "Warning" or "Failing" notice in DriveDx.
In my own personal experience, most SSD failures are usually quite sudden with no warning signs...even with a brand new SSD because it is the SSD's controller which tends to develop a problem and there is no health check for the SSD's controller. Around 2012 a group performed a multi-year torture test on some SSDs and tracked their health & behavior during the course of the endurance test. It is very interesting reading:
https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/
People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.
