04-13-2012, 04:45 PM
Yeah I dunno about that either though the answer bandied about seems to be "long enough that you won't have to worry about it". That Intel's drives have a 5 year warranty is some indication that they're pretty sure about them all lasting for 5 years under typical uses (which must include OS installs and therefore memory swapping).
The number I hear bandied about is "100,000" write operations, per cell. And all SSD drives are programmed to spread that out, so rather than writing to the same cells 1000 times while leaving some other cells untouched, it'll spread things around. And the limit is on writing, not reading, so endless reads of your Windows install and game files won't impact the lifetime.
Also figure every smartphone, tablet, MP3 player and camera these days uses the same flash technology, so it has to be pretty reliable.
The number I hear bandied about is "100,000" write operations, per cell. And all SSD drives are programmed to spread that out, so rather than writing to the same cells 1000 times while leaving some other cells untouched, it'll spread things around. And the limit is on writing, not reading, so endless reads of your Windows install and game files won't impact the lifetime.
Also figure every smartphone, tablet, MP3 player and camera these days uses the same flash technology, so it has to be pretty reliable.