[Tfug] Small-ish (capacity + size) disk alternatives

[John Hubbard]

On 1/28/2013 10:46 PM, Bexley Hall wrote:
> [snip]
> SSD's would probably fail in short order due to the
> inherent media life limitations (the read-write uses for
> the disk involve lots of update cycles).

Can you define "lots of update cycles"?

There are lots of fear around SSD lifespans that seems to be unfounded.  
This forum [1] looks at some of these issues.  In most cases a 40~64 GB 
drives allows a total of hundreds of terabytes of data to be written 
before failing.  One contributor reported writing 685TB of data to a 
40GB Intel 320 before it failed.  How much data are you going to write?!?

Beyond the endurance that you get out of a stock drive, as someone else 
mentioned, more spare area (via empty space or over-provisioning) --> 
less write amplification --> longer life span.  Additionally enterprise 
class drives also offer better endurance (in many cases this is done, or 
at least helped, by greater over-provisioning).

I personally have SSDs in all of my personal machines.  Intel X25-m 
(40GB), OCZ Solid (30GB), OCZ Vertex-Turbo (30GB), Intel 520 (120GB) and 
Intel 330, 4GiB who knows in my Eee PC 701 (4GB).   And an I'll admit 
that I don't have write heavily to the systems (my worst offense is 
probably the new 20+MB firefox-nightly package that I update daily.) but 
I have had no problems with any of the system.

[1] 
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm

-- 
-john

To be or not to be, that is the question
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255, that is the answer.