SSD Lifespan

[Vuitton]

I am curious to know what the average lifespan of a SSD would be? I know Windows 7 supports TRIM, but I read that only helps minimize the problem and not eliminate it. The SDDs are coming down in price, and it looks like by the this time next year they'll be in affordable ranges for when I build my new PC for FFXIV (and other games.)

Intel's 320 GB 'Postville' SSD May Arrive Soon - Tom's Hardware

New, Faster SSDs From Crucial up to 256 GB - Tom's Hardware

$600 for the 256gb. Probably be half that next year.

[Minions]

"Yang said a pattern could be perpetually repeated in which a 64GB SSD is completely filled with data, erased, filled again, then erased again every hour of every day for years, and the user still wouldn’t reach the theoretical write limit. He added that if a failure ever does occur, it will not occur in the flash chip itself but in the controller."

Basically, despite having limited writes per cell, your normal hdd's will probably die 2x in the time one of these will.

"
There's a reason Intel's new SLC SSDs are marketed toward datacenter users. Extremely long lifespan, very good reliability."


"Example: With the Eee PC SSD, a typical user (6 hours/day, 10% write rate) will write for 36 minutes per day resulting in a useful lifespan of ~25 years in my worst case below (last line in the table). In other words, I'm not going to worry about it. "
SSD Write Limit [EeeUser Eee PC Wiki]

TLDR. Write limit is not a issue.

[virusiidx]

I think it's still too early to invest in SSD drives. Give it a bit more time and they'll drop in price as they're getting more and more popular. Still good as a boot drive though. As for reliability, I would already assume since it has less moving mechanical parts, the failure rate would go down drastically. That goes for almost anything mechanical.

[Bardicrune]

Intel's X25-E SLC SSD is what we're using in our servers now. Their speed is far superior to magnetic platter based HDDs (Cheetah 15k.6 SAS). Q1 of 2010 Intel should be introducing a new SSD drive based on 34nm manufacturing process. This should significantly reduce the price. The only time we do not use these drives anymore is when storage capacity is an issue. Even then, we install the OS on these for faster booting/computing and just use 1TB SATA in RAID arrays for the storage.

Insofar as lifetime? The figures I've seen are as follows:
Writing 64GB of data to a 32GB drive every day the drive will still last 10+ years before failing. Compared to the 5-7 year average failure rate of an enterprise series HDD, it's a worthwhile investment.

[Rellikard]

From what I've been reading, nearly all SATA II SSDs (by Intel at least), have a 1,200,000 hour life span which roughly breaks down to 140 years... But then again, that's their estimate. I think over the next year, prices will come down quite a bit in SSDs so it may be worthwhile to wait. Also, I'm still wondering if manufacturer's have fixed the issue in SSDs where they occasionally freeze up when not performing a major function. Again, I'd say wait a bit. But if you really want to try one, by all means go ahead and let us know how it works out? Also have you read this?

Intel boosts speed, cuts prices of solid-state drives | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News