SSDs and maximum number of writes

I'm currently running a Crucial M225 SSD, and I know these drives have a limited number of writes. However, will my drive just reach the maximum amount of writes and one day it'll stop working and not boot into Windows? Or how does this work?

I'd suspect you'd experience reduced performance before a complete non boot occurred. SSD's are too new to have an accurate life expectancy, much less accurate data on end of life failures. Newer SSD's will have longer lives. But even 1st generation SSD's should have years of life before performance degradation is noticeable. By then, there will no doubt be information about how they fail, and what the warning signs are. A Guy

My understanding is that the individual memory cells just blink out like light bulbs when their state has been switched on and off a certain number of times. But the rest of the cells keep on working and so would the drive.

It's too early to tell, as A Guy pointed out, so very few people know what actually happens, but my guess is that you would start to get data errors and the capacity of the drive would start to diminish.

On a spinning drive a modern OS can identify bad blocks and flag them as unusable. I can't imagine why that wouldn't happen with an SSD too. Bad cells would be flagged as unusable and the drive's life would be extended, but like bad blocks showing up on a spinner, it'll be your cue to start shopping.

I just did some Googling and this drive uses a 34nm process, so I don't know if that's first generation of SSD's or what.

I would not worry about it. My oldest SSD (a 1st Gen 80GB Intel) works flawlesly since 2 years. I also have a 2 year old Vertex1 in another system which does not show any sign of fatigue. The Intel I just checked and this is the result: (look at the remaining lifetime). It is probably going to survive me - LOL.

As I understand it the drive shouldn't fail in the sense of a normal spinner failing. As the memory cells reach their maximum life they will just become readable only, so theoretically you will still be able to boot, up to a point after you start to get smart warnings that the drive is failing. I personally doubt that it will get slower write times though as the access times should stay fast even with less cells to access. The eventual end might happen very quickly lol