[TheGreatButcher]

I'm on a black MacBook from early 2008. The new MacBook Pro with Retina display is very very tempting to get.

The only problem: flash hard drive is the only option.

Why is this a problem? I'm skeptical about the life of the hard drive, especially considering the amount of photo and video editing I do on my MacBook. I am concerned that the hard drive longevity will be a significant problem for me with the amount of file moves I do and the limited life of SSD hard drives.

However, I have to admit, I'm a bit behind on technology news as it relates to SSD. I've been on a combination of deployment and remote assignments with the military for the last 18 months, so I haven't been able to keep up. What I'm looking for are experiences of others here with SSD hard drives that have put a lot of mileage on them. Are my concerns valid, or has the technology evolved enough that my concerns are no longer an issue? Please share.

[OreoCookie]

SSD do not break earlier than regular hard drives especially if you follow the same rule of thumb as before: avoid filling your drive to more than 70~80 % capacity. With traditional hard drives, the main reason is speed while for SSDs, the main reason is a significant increase in life span.

Modern SSDs have very capable controllers (the same type of processor you can find in an iPad or iPhone 4S sans graphics card, of course), and one of their primary functions is »wear leveling«, i. e. they keep track of how often a particular memory cell has been written to and they distribute the load as equally as possible. If bits go bad, they use spare memory. That's why you see a lot of drives with 120 or 240 GB capacity instead of 128 or 256 GB: the remaining memory is allocated to »spare«, i. e. memory cells that are used if others are marked as bad or have reached their natural life span.

I wouldn't be worried about the life span of SSDs. In some respects, they are much more robust than traditional hard drives. And once you notice the ginormous speed difference, you never ever want to go back I have added an SSD to my MacBook Pro in addition to a traditional hard drive and the speed difference is amazing. I hardly even realize when I run out of RAM anymore since the access times are so quick.

PS If you are interested in the technical background, arstechnica has a good article on the state of the art of SSDs.

[P]

Actually, sizes have evolved to the point that this is no longer an issue. The number of cycles that you write to flash has been trending down and is now in the 3000-5000 cycles range. What happens is that the drive firmware is designed to work around this and simply keeps the writes moving to different cells, making use of the entire drive. A 256 GB drive times 3000 cycles (worst case) means that the first cell should fail after writing some 750 TB. That's a lot of data. In fact, that's enough data that the drive will fail for other reasons well before then - certain components in the flash will wear out after about 10 years.

There are other issues with flash reliability, but the drive that Apple seems to have switch to (Samsung 830) has an excellent record in the marketplace. Keep backups because you always should, but don't treat it any other than you would a regular HDD.

[Shaddim]

I love SSDs, they're in all my machines now. You just can't beat the boot-up and application launch times. Also, not had any go tits up on me yet and a few of them have been in service for a few years (Intel G1 and G2s). *knock wood*

[subego]

+1

A decent drive controller on your SSD (which most of them have since you're paying out the ass) will stop using bits before they go irrevocably bad.