What is the average lifespan of a consumer-grade solid state disk?

It’s a difficult question to answer because estimating an http://owerdatarecovery.com/hard-drive-recovery/ssd-data-recovery.html’s life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more.Check this article for more details cause these guys tested the lifespan of SSDs.

That depends on the technology used. Run of the mill from a few years back may start to fail in the first year of moderate use and just slowly cover it up with degraded performance for 2 - 3 years. After 5 years you will notice the difference, or it may even stop working. Under heavy load these numbers are worse. Samsung’s 3D VNAND is supposed to change the wear problems significantly. They give endurance quotes of 10 years for 40 GB R/W daily. That workload may seem large or small given your application, but it gives a realistic expectation. I have had a few of these in moderate use for years and have not seen a significant change in performance yet.I think if you have a read heavy workload, most modern flash drives will last 5+ years. You may start to see the tip up in failures slightly before or after depending on the technology used. As your workload shifts to writes, the number of years goes down quickly. If you are constantly rewriting the whole drive I would expect less than a year. Spinning media still has a use in these cases, although the new shingled recording techniques for higher densities there are spoiling that party.