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Limited Read and Writes on MBA

R

rekhyt

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 20, 2008
1,127
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Part of the old MR guard.
Just thought of a concern on the MacBook Air. Flash drives / SSDs have limited read and write capacity, right?

How do I know when I am reaching that? I don't want my data to be corrupted.

Thanks in advance.
 
I'm not sure there is any warning. I do know I have a couple 256GB SSDs that are a couple years old and have crazy amounts of writes completed - filled up many times over, full disk encryption, etc and they're still chugging along. Those were Crucial C300s. My MBA laptops are too new so I can't really comment on their SSDs.
 
rekhyt said:
Just thought of a concern on the MacBook Air. Flash drives / SSDs have limited read and write capacity, right?

How do I know when I am reaching that? I don't want my data to be corrupted.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

Beyond the life of your MBA tbh.
 
Assuming the flash drive in an Air uses 25nm NAND (I believe it does), these chips will last 3,000 write cycles to each cell on the NAND chip. You are not likely to hit that limit for many years.

Even if you start to hit that limit, the drive's firmware will just mark a cell as unusable and skip over it. It is not like one day all of a sudden the drive won't work.

If you do some Google searches there are a few articles on this showing if you write XX... amount of data each day a flash drive will last YYY years.
 
Based on Weaselboy's comments, I googled it and found this in the first result:
Keep in mind, this is a single sample drive
If we figure a five year projected life for the Wildfire, that means even if we stopped using the SSD now with 20% remaining, the 270TB written equates to roughly 150GB written to the drive per day, more than a full drive write per day. Even the most aggressive consumers won't come close to punishing an SSD that bad and if you do, you likely know it and will accept a shorter than five year drive life. The type of NAND inside this drive also makes a difference, using 32nm MLC Toggle NAND, rated for 5,000 P/E cycles versus 3,000 from 2xnm.
Click to expand...
http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_performance_review_270tb_written
 
rekhyt said:
Well I do lots of read and write-intensive operations. I copy a lot of data (Movies, DSLR photos, ...) so I was just worried about that.

What are the warning symptoms of the limit?
Click to expand...

You still have nothing to worry about.

Reads are unlimited theoretically, it's the writes that has a finite amount but even then, its nothing you should really concern yourself with. I've written 1.56TB to my SSD in my desktop PC and i'm still at 100% health.
 
2IS said:
You still have nothing to worry about.

Reads are unlimited theoretically, it's the writes that has a finite amount but even then, its nothing you should really concern yourself with. I've written 1.56TB to my SSD in my desktop PC and i'm still at 100% health.
Click to expand...

Thanks all for the replies.

How do you check the health of your SSD?
 
rekhyt said:
Thanks all for the replies.

How do you check the health of your SSD?
Click to expand...

Not sure how to do it in OSX but there are utilities from the drive manufacturers as well as 3rd party utilities for windows. I used a program called Crystal Disk Info
 
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