Limited Read and Writes on MBA

[rekhyt]

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.

 

[bogatyr]

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.

 

[Gav2k]

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.

Beyond the life of your MBA tbh.

 

[rekhyt]

Beyond the life of your MBA tbh.

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?

 

[Weaselboy]

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.

 

[bogatyr]

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.

http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_performance_review_270tb_written

 

[2IS]

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?

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.

 

[rekhyt]

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.

Thanks all for the replies.

How do you check the health of your SSD?

 

[2IS]

Thanks all for the replies.

How do you check the health of your SSD?

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