Club409

If anyone is considering getting a laptop that someone else is paying for I highly recommend getting a solid state hard drive put in it.  Just got a new Macbook Pro today with a 500 GB SSD and it boots insanely fast really quiet too.  They're also apparently almost indestructible (one engineer in our division had a bad experience with his kid knocking a laptop off the counter and losing a bunch of data after that the SSDs became a justifiable business expense).  The quad core processor and 8 gb ram isn't too shabby either.  Hooray tax dollars!

Yeah SSDs still have a max lifespan of 5-30 thousand write cycles. However I just learned that they will lose data integrity if they are without power for extended periods of time and the drives with the higher write cycle lifetime sacrifice a significant amount of power off time in order to achieve the higher write cycle lifetime (1 year for the low write cycle drives 3 months for the high write cycle drives).

Additionally SSDs will actually decrease in performance as you use the computer due to the fact that flash must be erased and written in large blocks even if the data you are writing is only a few KB. To overwrite an existing block or append data to a partially full block you must read the existing data into memory modify it in memory erase the block then write the block to disk. But when the drive is new most blocks are empty so all you have to do is write to an empty block and you're done. But as the drive is used most blocks are at least partially full so you have to do the full read/write cycle.

Oh wait my bad I misread the info. You only see data loss without power after you hit the specified write cycles. So with a new drive it will retain the data for a very long time without power. But after you hit say 30k writes the data may only last a few months without power.

You are correct about it being cycles per block; however modern OSes are constantly writing to the drive for things like filesystem journaling file metadata and the page file. Couple this with the wear-leveling algorithms built into the drive's controller and the writes on every block across the drive quickly add up.

Also there seems to be a lot of conflicting information out there but what it boils down to is there are 2 types of flash drives: SLC and MLC. SLC is less dense and therefore more expensive but has greater write endurance (100k cycles). MLC is more dense and therefore cheaper but has lower write endurance (10k cycles). (There's also enterprise level versions of both that give you the additional write cycles but lowered data retention time after you hit the write endurance limit I mentioned before)

As for the perfomance decline it can be significant (for comparison a 1TB Seagate standard HDD gets about 115MB/s in sequential writes). Supposedly there's a command called TRIM that's supposed to resolve this issue for most drives but you need Windows 7 or OS X 10.6.8 (just released) to be able to use it

I was assuming you actually wanted to do something with the computer heyoooooooooooo