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Re: [LUG] Lifespan of an SSD [Was Re: Setting up new disk.]

 

SubBASS wrote:
On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 23:28 +0100, Julian Hall wrote:

Something I've wondered about for a while, but keep forgetting to ask.

As I understand it, SSD lifespan is measured in numbers of r/w cycles, as discussed at http://hothardware.com/News/Two-Methods-for-Measuring-SSD-Lifespans/ With that in mind is it such a great idea to put an OS on an SSD as it will be almost constantly engaged in readign and writing, far more so I would have thought than a data drive - depending on the user of course.

The intel I got is something like 1,200,000 hours mtbf I think I read,
which my calculator tells me is 136 years.... I somehow doubt that is
its average lifespan in real applications, if it goes 5years though it
will do.

The upside of an SSD is when it does fail from exhausted read/writes, it
merely becomes read only afaik, no catastrophic data loss, which I have
to say I am in favour of :]


I,m a bit out of date on the technical stuff but it used to be that each bit of storage was re-usable a certain number of times. This meant that you could only do so many read/write operations before failures cropped up. Nowadays they have slightly smarter algorithms that move things around the ssd to try an even out wear however I think things like swap can still cause problems so you can still wipe one out a lot faster than 5 years.
Tom te tom te tom

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