Microsoft retracts Windows 7 PC end-of-sales deadline

Lady Fitzgerald said:

King Arthur said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

True of early SSDs. The newer ones are far more reliable.

* SSDs have finite lifetimes owing to their fundamental design, whereas HDDs will almost never die simply from daily routine usage.
Nothing here is true. Current SSDs will probably last longer than you will want to keep using them due to advancing technology rendering them obsolete. HDDs will eventually wear out, some sooner than others.

I was referring to SSDs having a finite number of write cycles before the flash memory flat out refuses to be written to, resulting in the eventual death of the drive. Now, unless I am simply being unaware of a revolutionary change in the type of flash memory being used in SSDs (please correct me if I'm wrong!), this is still a very legitimate problem that SSDs have. HDDs which store data via magnetic storage don't wear themselves out simply by writing data in, at least as far as I know. Again, please enlighten me if I am outdated here!...

You are outdated here. The finite write limitation has been shown to have been blown well out of proportion. Tests have been done showing as many as 300TB of writes without failure. It will take most people dozens of years to make that many writes. The 128GB Samsung 840 Pro in my desktop has been running 24/7 for 11 months (except for two one week long trips when I shut the machine down) has only 2.3TB of writes on it. At that rate, it will easily last me 79 to 119 years, well past the hoped for seven year lifetime of the machine it is in. That drive will be obsolete well before then although I'll probably still be using it until I retire the machine. The SSD I recently put in my notebook will probably be able to last 200 years since it doesn't get heavy usage even though it being used for both the OS and data. Obviously, I won't use it that long. As long as one takes precautions to avoid excessive, unnecessary writes, such as not defragging them (SSDs don't need defragging anyway), they will last longer than most people will need them to last, even with heavy usage.

Again, many of your allegations were true of the first generations of SSDs but they have come a long, long way since then.

Writing data on to a HDD will not wear it out. Spinning the platters will eventually wear out the bearings.

Very intriguing! It would seem that barring some extreme or specialized workloads, one does not need to worry about "writing out" an SSD as much as the older generations of SSDs. A very good thing to know.

Also interesting how the Samsung SSDs tested were the first to show clear signs of deterioration, though mainly due to known design differences rather than any kind of flaws.

Thank you very much for the heads up!