Do I have to worry about the amount of writes on an SSD?

[ManBearPig]

Specifically the Crucial M4 128gb. Should i make sure to not continually download and erase new things?

 

[Coup27]

Unless the SSD is in a server or very high load machine, then you do not need to worry about wearing it out. Use it as you would a HDD and enjoy it's speed.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I think I remember somewhere reading about an SSD fatigue test and it turned out that the drive got slower over time but it took way more work than you'd do in a normal environment. Like doing a years worth of data in a week.

As it turns out the Crucial M4 didn't do too poorly on that front while the Samsung 830 drive tested as well would exhibit a bit more slowdown than the Crucial drive. Neither was that big of a deal anyway.

I'm sure with some searching you could find that test. I just can't for the life of me remember where I read it.

 

[F1shF4t]

Specifically the Crucial M4 128gb. Should i make sure to not continually download and erase new things?

No, don't worry about writes to it. As Coup27 said unless the drive is in a server or a machine which consantly smashes it with writes you shouldn't worry.

To put it in perspective, if you re-wrote the contents of your entire ssd twice a day every day the drive should still last 3-4 years before NAND reaches its rated lifetime writes. Even after that the drive will be usable, just will have a less and less data retention time as it writes more.