SSD disk longevity

[Andrew Bernard]

Greetings All,

This comes up on every single forum sooner or later, and always generates 
really interesting talk. I’m forking this thread from the one on Frescobaldi.

Consumer grade SSD’s wear out. They must do, it is the nature of the solid 
state storage technology they use. But they last a lot longer than folklore 
suggests. Here’s a reliable article from Ars Technica indicating 700TB to 1PB 
worth of total writes to consumer disks. In case we forget how much 1 TB is, 
the Hubble Space Telescope in over twenty years of continuous observing has 
gathered about 50 TB of data.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/consumer-grade-ssds-actually-last-a-hell-of-a-long-time/

SSD’s can fail earlier for a host of reasons apart from memory cell wear, so of 
course they fail in the normal statistical distribution curves.

I wouldn’t be too concerned about this matter. Consider also that most of the 
new Apple Mac’s are completely SSD based, and nobody is fearful of them wearing 
out too quickly.

Andrew

[Now to sit back and watch the controversy :-)]