At 7:46 PM -0700 10/21/2010, ah...clem wrote:
a HD's reliable life is still more than one order of magnitude greater than the best (most expensive) SSD currently available. SSD's have a finite number of read/write cycles that just doesn't compare to a well-built HD (quantum, seagate, maxtor).
As I recall, the write-cycle for NAND is 200 to 300k per cell. And the write cycle for HD sectors is something over 100M per. Is that the right magnitudes & current ballpark?
if you made a SSD your boot drive (meaning you would be reading and writing more or less constantly) you can expect it to have a safe reliable life of 2-3 years.
I think 2 to 3 years is highly optimistic. My pile of failing usb flash sticks aside, already, I'm seeing modded laptops with SSD failures -- after just a year or so of use.
My impression is that SSD and high write-cycle usage such as paging, swap, scrach, photo editing, etc, just Do Not Mix.
Now, the new crop of flash memory technologies are supposed to be better than the previous... lol
...This is a point of failure that we're going to have to keep our eye on, especially since we LEMfolk tend to deal with older / used machines that will be especially susceptible. I think a lot of our troubleshooting is based on the idea that if a drive isn't acting very wonky, it's fine. We're going to have to deal more and more with diagnosing file corruption issues. Mac OS X's code signing feature will help with that, from the OS' POV. But that won't protect our user data at all!
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