Retina Macbook Pro Flash Storage for Documents?

[mazuma]

I just received my 15" Retina MacBook Pro and I had a question regarding the flash storage drive. I was under the impression that flash storage is really great for boot times and app launch. Essentially for reads flash drives are best. But, for write times they are so so. Also, I read that flash drives will degrade over time with reads and writes. Today I'm reading that flash drives will degrade over time, but the computer will probably be replaced before that ever happens.

I also have an older mac pro that I installed a SSD drive in to give it more pep. It seems the consensus then was to set up the SSD as the OS and application drive only. For document and settings point those to another internal drive.

Should I be using some type of external drive for my documents? Like I've done for my tower. Or, is it fine to just use the flash drive for everything?

 

[mfram]

Use the flash for everything unless you need more space. The low-level drivers take care of wear-leveling the flash drive. Your computer will be out-of-date before the flash drive fails from wear.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

It is fine to use the flash drive for everything, including documents and settings. The same holds true for an SSD.

Normally modern SSDs have a theoretical write/read limit of 10,000 to 100,000 cycles (P/E cycles), meaning if you had a 64 GB SSD and its cycle limit would be 10,000, you would have to write 625 TB to it, which would be 351 GB per day everyday for the next five years. Assuming those numbers vary and it would only be a tenth of that, it would still mean 35 GB per day, which under normal usage no average computer consumer does, not even with temporary files.

I have a 128 GB SSD and 500 GB HDD in my 2009 MBP and the SSD holds the OS, applications, my user folders including settings. The HDD holds files bigger than the SSD can hold and I do not need access to every time.

 

[mazuma]

It looks like it's unanimous. Thanks for the help.