SSDs, and their life expectancy
Jun. 12th, 2019 03:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyBack in 2013, I took the step of replacing the spinning disk hard drive with an SSD. In terms of reliability, the weak point of an SSD is how many times it can be written to. Once that limit is reached, the drive stops working. However, the number of write cycles is higher than one would think. For most users, the drive would be replaced only because it would run out of room in a normal sense.
For my main laptop, the one that gets the most use, there has been a total of 12TB of data written to it over 6 years. Given that there are reports of these drives surviving PBs of write cycles, that means I'd have to be using this laptop for hundreds of years at my current pace.
Sure enough, the biggest issue I'm having now is running out of space. When I put this in, I put in a 250GB drive, which at the time cost me about $240. These days, a direct replacement with the same capacity would cost me less than half, so when I do replace the drive, I'll probably jump up to a full 1TB.
The speeds, though! I'm spoiled by how fast these are. That's what sold me on them. While they may be more expensive than their mechanical equivalents, going to an SSD is one of the most effective upgrades one can do for a computer modern enough to have a SATA port. Oh, and they're also basically immune to physical shocks that would instantly destroy a mechanical drive, which makes them great for laptops. It's also the reason why, when I got my travel-centric laptop in 2015 (runs 10 hours on battery vs 40 minutes for my older laptop), I opted to put an SSD in that as well.
I've even gone as far as putting SSDs in my older PowerBooks. The way I did that was I found mSATA/IDE adapters, cloned the original hard drive contents to the mSATA drives, then put it all together. This was not as successful as I had hoped, but I'm not really surprised. When the main connection is IDE, that's an incredible bottleneck. That said, the only thing to be gained from this method is being able to replace a failing IDE drive with something that's still commercially available, and/or for higher capacities. A niche application.
Now if only I could somehow put an SSD into the Amiga....
For my main laptop, the one that gets the most use, there has been a total of 12TB of data written to it over 6 years. Given that there are reports of these drives surviving PBs of write cycles, that means I'd have to be using this laptop for hundreds of years at my current pace.
Sure enough, the biggest issue I'm having now is running out of space. When I put this in, I put in a 250GB drive, which at the time cost me about $240. These days, a direct replacement with the same capacity would cost me less than half, so when I do replace the drive, I'll probably jump up to a full 1TB.
The speeds, though! I'm spoiled by how fast these are. That's what sold me on them. While they may be more expensive than their mechanical equivalents, going to an SSD is one of the most effective upgrades one can do for a computer modern enough to have a SATA port. Oh, and they're also basically immune to physical shocks that would instantly destroy a mechanical drive, which makes them great for laptops. It's also the reason why, when I got my travel-centric laptop in 2015 (runs 10 hours on battery vs 40 minutes for my older laptop), I opted to put an SSD in that as well.
I've even gone as far as putting SSDs in my older PowerBooks. The way I did that was I found mSATA/IDE adapters, cloned the original hard drive contents to the mSATA drives, then put it all together. This was not as successful as I had hoped, but I'm not really surprised. When the main connection is IDE, that's an incredible bottleneck. That said, the only thing to be gained from this method is being able to replace a failing IDE drive with something that's still commercially available, and/or for higher capacities. A niche application.
Now if only I could somehow put an SSD into the Amiga....
