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#51
Most of the writes are in RAM. Most HD activity is just READ stuff, which won't degrade the drive. An exception would be your TEMP Folder, which in my case is redirected to another drive. I also have Firefox save all my downloads to a separate drive. The only thing which I haven't figured out yet is what impact all the email I get each day is having, since most of that is read-and-delete stuff. If I find out that this is significant I may try to move my email profile to another drive as well. Since most of these are very small (3kb, plus slack for cluster size) I doubt they are a problem.
The Wikipedia article I linked to listed a figure of "10,000 cycles" as being the normal life expectancy of Flash RAM. With Wear leveling taken into account I expect the SSD to last roughly as long as most of my mechanical drives, almost all of which go clickety-clack at some point anyway. Even if I get my three-years under warranty and that's it, by then I would bet that 80GB SSDs will be in the same bargain bin that 250GB mechanical drives were sent to once 1TB and 2TB mechanical drives became widely available at a reasonable price. By then, I could probably afford a 500GB SSD for what I paid for my 80GB SSD last month.
PS: Anyone else feel weird describing an 80GB drive as "puny"? It wasn't so long ago that I thought I was set for life with that kind of capacity...