My understanding is it is now years. I've been googling for it, and failed to find anything recent - but a 2007 paper put it at 51 years writing continuously.
So could a power supply failure, or a fire - and a fire is rather technology independent.
You always need a backup unless you really don't care if you lose a data.
Even my personal photos have an offsite backup, when the cost of failure is merely a few expletives.
Andy
I can see why you snipped his third sentence, but the second is your answer: "You instantly negate the major benefit of the SSD, namely its speed."
You'd also need a USB-SATA adapter.
Andy
Depends entirely on the usage pattern, write rate specifically. In typical high load Enterprise environments, it's now well over
3 years, and 3 years continuous writes is all Enterprise grade HDDs are designed for, so they've surpassed HDD design life. However, it's quite easy to produce a pathologically bad test that will expire them in a year, but most loads, even very intensive ones, should see 5 years use. Data growth sees most storage systems replaced (or at least all the disks in them upgraded) more often than 5 years, to increase capacity.The consumer grade MLC disks have a shorter life in terms of write cycles, but are not going to come even close to the load an Enterprise server can put on a disk, so I would actually expect longer life.
Likewise, and the on-site disks are mirrored, and scanned for data corruptions weekly.
I recently bought a USB 3 2.5" disk case for about £6. USB 3 should be quick enough to cope with most SSDs.
I just used and eSATA case to clone my HDD on to my momentus XT drive. It certainly makes the computer feel quicker. I might even turn it off instead of suspending it now.
The USB would be for backup. The knob could not figure that out.
A Knob on here said it was not.
Quote Drivel: "A straight swap? HHD out SSD in? Going to ssd optimised Windows 7 would of course optimise the ssd."
Which doesn't remotely sound like using SSD for backup.
If you just want to give Windows a few GB to play with, you could try ReadyBoost with an SD card. Far more sensible, in a physical/attachment sense, on a lappie than a USB dongle sticking out or an external drive. Though I am not sure how effective it is thought to be these days.
If you noticed other posts I am on about backup as well. Knobs can't get this. This is sad.
ReadyBoost is a disk cache store softaware thingy with Win 7 OS. It is not permanent storage. Some knobs I know even know that.
BZZZZZZZZZ!!! Knobhead Alert!!! BZZZZZZZZZ!!! Knobhead Alert!!! BZZZZZZZZZ!!! Knobhead Alert!!! BZZZZZZZZZ!!! Knobhead Alert!!!
But how long for an average home PC user?
Quite surprised - higher than I thought.
It was also in the late very much UN-lamented Vista.
So what if its is not permanent? If it gives you the performance boost, it doesn't really matter, does it? And with a hybrid drive, you really have no idea whether it is permanently in SSD or on HDD, do you? Or whether it keeps changing.
Enterprise use is usually estimated at writing 20GB a day, every day, and expectation is now something like 3 to 5 years.
So scale that for your typical average daily usage, and you will get some idea.
The point was backup, but go ahead...
True. It seemed a cheap way to improve performance.
All these are twiddles around the edge to get improved performance until proper, large sized, everlasting (not with a limited lifetime), affordable ssd drives are here.
I know someone who has a 9 or 10 year old Hungarian Celeron cheapo (with the graphics on the mother board, so the CPU does the graphics as well as all the other tasks ) from PC World. It was so slow it was awful after an XP upgrade with constant noisy disk accesses. Some cheap RAM and an ssd transformed the computer. It was workable with more than acceptable speed. It was a highly cost effective way - no need to ditch a perfectly good workable machine. He reasoned that if he did have to buy another pc the ssd would be swapped into the new machine and the existing hdd used for backup, so no loss on buying the ssd.
You are basically there now. You may have a long wait for SSD to match spinning disks on price per GB, but they are large enough and affordable enough now to be useful. The lifetime limit is now as good or better than the spinning disks, so not really an issue.
The layering of storage technologies (i.e. placing faster storage closer to the CPU) is always likely to apply, given that the best performance options will usually be the most expensive.
There is a "free" utility called RamDisk that creates a ram disk - instructions are on the web. The ram disk is seen from explorer (My Computer) as a normal disk drive and assigned a number. The ram disk can be a cache say for Firefox or Chrome. If you have say 1 GB of RAM a ramdisk of say 300mb can be setup very quickly. It can autostart on boot up and makes the browser perform noticeably faster, inc Youtube and the likes. Most home users do not use the RAM available. It is simple and easy.
Doing a Google, most who have installed ssd's in older machines have made the machine sing to what it was by spending £70 or so. I don't think £60-70 is a lot to vastly improve your computer when it is OK except for speed - it can save nearly £1000 in not buying a new machine. Of course the odd bit of RAM disk creation can assist as well - assuming you have spare RAM - and must be the first step in increasing speed.
Again doing a Google and on Youtube, the estimate of a ssd's life for home use varies from 5, 15 or 30 years. Still as clear as mud.
I would chuck the OS on the machine away if that actually works! Why? because a modern OS will cache the disk in RAM anyway and that makes it as quick as a RAM disk. If it isn't in the cache then something else more important has replaced it. If you lock it it into a RAM disk then that's RAM which can't be used to cache the more important stuff, like the actual program.
Or they may go up in price, due to increased demand.
Some apps write stuff to temporary files that doesn't need to be written to disc - and yet as they don't mark the files as temporary they have to be flushed out. Quite common, and annoying.
Andy
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