SSDs - Limiting writes, is there a point?

[Beautiful_Life]

The discussion is pretty silly. Even if the wear leveling doesn't work very well, at the current rate I'm writing to it, there is no way the cells are going to wear out before my 3 years warranty is up and I believe in 3 years time the drive is going to end up in the dustbin.

Although it's wrong, even if only 60GB of cells were being written to that works out to just 12 write cycles, let's make it 21 to be super conservative. That works out to 7 per month 84 per year, hardly going to touch the 1000 conservative cycles we have. Furthermore, it's not like I'm gonna reinstall my OS and programs every month. It's a new PC so I had to redo things a few times to get them right, now that it's settled down I don't see myself doing it again. Also of the 80Gb HDD I have, 6GB has been set aside to replace any cells that do die off. Data is being moved around the SSD all the time and the controller is smart enough to manage them so that a dead cell won't affect the data integrity or the drive's performance.

Using Ramdisk and disabling every single feature that writes to the disk is just being a plain paranoid or tweak freak.

Btw, you should check out Anand Tech's very interesting article on SSD that explains wear leveling pretty well.

 

[taltamir]

There does seem to be some concern that as features size is reduced (now at 25nm) the number of writes before failure is less AND the length of time the data is valid may be as little as a few months before you must re-write it. That was what I meant about a potential wall...


Brian

thats a load of bull. actually, the lifespan keeps increasing as the technology matures. To the point where triple bit cells become feasible.
plus there is a whole new tech of SSD based on glass vs crystal solid state status of cells. Those retain data literally forever and have immeasurable writes. you can already buy them, but they are more expensive and more limited on size (so they are currently limited to specialty devices). But as you shrink the size our current SSD tech runs into more leakage problems, while the glass vs crystal tech gets better results. and thats just one of several alternative SSD techs out there. So don't you worry about it, you will not get SSDs which last only a few months before dying.