when it reaches full write it simply becomes a read only drive, like a regular CDR disk. You cannot "revive" them, but your data is safe.
an MLC has only 10,000 writes per cell. and intel estimates GENEROUSLY that it will last at LEAST 5 years for the overwhelming majority... SLC will last 10 times longer (50 years +).
Write amplification does matter though (efficiency), intel CLAIMS their drive gets 1.1x amplification, while the worst controller on the market (on very old SSDs, first gen) was up to 40x write amplification.
To calculate it yourself... an 80GB drive with 100,000 erase cycles can thus have 80GB x 100,000 lifetime writes = 8 million GB lifetime writes. now you need to account for write amplification. AWD (actual written data) x WA (write amplification) = total write capacity lifetime.
I think 2-3 is a realistic write amplification worse case scenario for the vertex. so AWD x 2 = 8 million GB lifetime writes
AWD = 4 million GB lifetime writes.
If you want it to last 50 years you must limit yourself to 4 million / 50 = 80,000 GB per year, or divide by 365 = 219.18GB per day. almost 220GB a day.
Do you write 219GB per day? because those are the "worst case figures" under which the 5 years for MLC and 50 for SLC are based...
Note also, that the more space your drive has, the longer it will last, double the capacity from 60GB to 120GB and you will have to write twice the amount daily, making the SLC drive last 50 years with 440GB a day writes instead of 220... or you can double the years and just say that a 60GB SLC written at 22GB a day will last 500 YEARS.
you want to know how long the MLC drive lasts? divide it by 10... 220 divide by 10... you get 22GB a day... So for the current MLC vertex, at 60GB, you need to write 22GB a day every single day for the next 50 years for it to run out of writes... at which case it becomes a read only media without any dataloss.
However, lets say you are trying to put a database on it, and it is one that maxes out writes by writing constantly... those drives do what.. 100MB/s writes? so thats 0.1 GB/s write x 60 seconds per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, times 24 hours per day, times 365 days per year. = 3,153,600GB a year... remember we expect to be able to write 4 million GB in its lifetime.
So depending on write amplification, if you somehow manage to get it writing at FULL SPEED 24/7 it will last slightly more than a single year... This is of course completely unrealistic for a home user, who can easily expect it to last 500 years. And even most SERVERS can safely assume that is not gonna happen...
This was more of an issue in the days of 4GB and 8GB drives with huge write amplifications... an 8GB drive with 40x amplification and 10k lifetime writes gives you 80k/40 lifetime GB write = 2000GB per lifetime, aka, 2TB total writes before it goes out... I don't think the 40x ever existed in SSDs that look like actual DRIVES, only in the worst of THUMB DRIVES... so an 8GB MLC thumb drive will only write 2TB total before it stops writing. and it might have really terrible firmware that actually DOES cause the drive to break instead of becoming read only. (if the engineers back then weren't aware of the issue, today the issue is known so its taken into account and compensated for)...
Well there is a cavet... Modern flash all have write spreading algorithms... i think on a flash drive you CAN have it write to the same SPOT on the drive over and over (say, by using NTFS which placed the log on the same few sectors), and those sectors can realistically wear out earlier, but again, not an issue in real SSD drives.
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