SSD Lifetime Calculator
Estimate SSD lifespan from TBW rating, drive capacity and daily write volume.
About SSD Lifetime Calculator
SSD manufacturers rate endurance in Total Bytes Written (TBW) — the total data volume the drive is warrantied to absorb before flash cell wear meaningfully increases failure risk. Subtracting cumulative writes so far from the rated TBW gives the remaining write budget, and dividing that by the current daily write rate projects how many more days of use remain at that rate. This is a linear projection assuming a steady write rate; workloads with growing write volume (more logging, larger databases, heavier caching) will exhaust the remaining budget faster than this estimate suggests.
Formula
Remaining lifespan in days
remaining_days = (rated_TBW − total_written) / daily_writes
- W_{rated}
- manufacturer rated TBW
- W_{used}
- cumulative writes so far
- w
- current daily write rate
Worked example
With the default values below, SSD Lifetime Calculator returns Estimated Remaining Lifespan of 26.91. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.
Inputs used
- Rated Endurance (TBW)minimum 1 TB
- 600 TB
- Total Written So Farminimum 0 TB
- 120 TB
- Current Daily Write Rateminimum 0.001 GB/day
- 50 GB/day
Results
- Estimated Remaining Lifespan
- 26.91 years
- Endurance Consumed
- 20.00%
- Estimated Remaining Lifespan
- 9,830 days
- Status
- Healthy — well within rated endurance
Step by step
- 1Values used
- 2Remaining lifespan in days
- 3Estimated Remaining Lifespan= 26.91 years
- 4Endurance Consumed= 20.00
- 5Estimated Remaining Lifespan= 9,830 days
- 6Status= Healthy — well within rated endurance
Assumptions and limits
- The result is derived only from the 3 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
- In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
- Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.
How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find total writes so far on a Linux system?
Run `smartctl -a /dev/sdX` (or /dev/nvme0n1 for NVMe drives) and look for 'Total_LBAs_Written' (SATA SSDs, multiply by the logical block size, usually 512 bytes) or the 'Data Units Written' field (NVMe, each unit is 512,000 bytes) to get cumulative host writes.
Does exceeding the rated TBW mean the SSD will immediately fail?
Not necessarily — TBW is a conservative warranty threshold, and many SSDs continue operating well beyond their rated endurance, though the risk of uncorrectable errors and eventual failure increases as flash cells wear out, so treat exceeding TBW as an increasing risk rather than a hard failure point.
Why might my actual daily write rate be higher than what I observe at the application layer?
Write amplification means the SSD controller often writes more data internally than the host requested, due to wear-leveling, garbage collection and how flash pages must be erased in larger blocks before rewriting — actual NAND writes measured by the drive's own SMART data can exceed host-level writes by a meaningful factor depending on workload pattern and drive overprovisioning.