There's a lot of ill-informed comments about SSDs having a limited number of read/write cycles and therefore not lasting the pace. While that is essentially true, the technological improvements in SSD technology are almost exponential. I can remember when a 128Mb Flash Drive was considered HUGE, now you can pick up a pocket 64Gb flash drive for around Bt6,000.

The number of read/write cycles early SSDs could manage was around 10,000 cycle per cell. Which made them fine for copying files to take home and work on, for example. But now they are in the millions (perhaps even tens of millions) per cell. And you have GIGABYTES of cells. And you have SMART, and other hardware features to automatically isolate the odd cell that does go wrong.

To quote from some 2007 research (and imagine the improvements since then!):

"We assume perfect wear leveling which means we need to fill the disk 2 million times to get to the write endurance limit.

2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds.

That's a meaningless number - which needs to be divided by seconds in an hour, hours in a day etc etc to give...

The end result is 51 years!"

By the time 20 years has elapsed we'll be looking at 3 gazillion terabyte flash drives to hold 3D VFHDIIFLATILAFR video (very f**king high definition indeed in fact look at that it looks almost F**king real).

So no, nowadays, it really isn't an issue.

In fact, as far as Mean Time Between Failure is concerned, your average hard disk is probably more susceptible because of the moving parts, friction, vibration, etc.

Like I said in another thread, I opted for a 64Gb SSD in my netbook instead of a 160Gb hard disk. Windows 7 still runs fine, but the battery life as probably double.