MacBook core i7 : a real powerfull laptop or a sadly build toy ?

[Jeff Massung]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Neal Campbell <nealk3nc at gmail.com> wrote:

> Purely anecdotal but from what I read, if you continuously wrote on the
> disk
> drive, a MLC-controller SSD would last more than 5 years and a SLC
> controller SSD would last more than 30 years.
>
>
This is only true when the write drivers for the device go through a *lot*
of hoops (I had to do this ~10 years ago at a past job). For example,
i-nodes on the drive for any given file will be far from anything close to
sequential, slowing down reads and caching. Also, often times to improve the
lifetime of a cell, bytes will be written in reverse or using other
encodings; this is a common for text files where one encoding will use the
upper bits and another the lower bits. But, again, this takes processing
time. If you aren't willing to go through these hoops in your driver - or
you disable these "features" of your SSD, you can be quite sure you'll kill
it in well under 5 years.

Note: even with these features, the past company I worked for would burn
through 4 GB flash drives (remember, this was 10 years ago) in < 1 month,
given the work we were doing with them. I'm sure things have improved
considerably since then, though.

Food for thought.

Jeff M.