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It will outlast a standard hard drive by orders of magnitude so it's completely not an issue.

With wear leveling and the technology now supporting millions of writes it just doesn't matter. Here's a random data sheet: http://mtron.net/Upload_Data/Spec/ASIC/MOBI/PATA/MSD-PATA3035_rev0.3.pdf

"Write endurance: >140 years @ 50GB write/day at 32GB SSD"

Basically the device will fail before it reaches the it runs out of write cycles. You can overwrite the entire device twice a day and it will last longer than your lifetime. Of course it will fail due to other issues before then anyway.

Can there be a mention of SSDs without this out-dated garbage being brought up?

I am used to Slashdot being more objective and informed than this. Write speed is extremely important in this market. Mtron has been selling much more mature products to NASA and the US military for many months already. check out : http://www.mtron.net/English/Product/ProductDetail.asp?itemcode=MSP-SATA7535 Sustained Read** 130 Sustained Write** 120

Wear is not an issue. The available space will get smaller as some of the cells wear out, but with a drive of any serious size, this is neglegible If a 64G drive shrinks to 63Gigs after 2 years, would I care? No. And it isn't that bad.

It is true that writing speeds are a weakness for SSDs, but this is only when compared to how well they can read. Aso it is random writes, not sequential writes that are most difficult. However, the second generation drives already have faster write speeds than HDDs, so this is in no way a downside of SSD technology, but just a downside of the first generation of SSDs that don't write that fast.

I decided to test SSD drives on couple of laptop users some months ago.
Today we have none of them left, all went bad in a matter of weeks.
Tried SanDisk 5000 series, both 2.5" and 1,5". No luck.
1,8 died completely, 2.5 just got more and more bad blocks.
Will try with Mitron 7000 as well, when the damn thing ships.

But whatever they say, my suggestion is to keep out of this SSD business until there is more reliable NV memory than flash...

p.s. Writing is sloooowwww, I have commented it earlier here

Does anyone actually have any stats to compare flash write limitatons to conventional hard disks? It's not hard to find numbers for flash, but I have trouble finding the numbers for conventional hard disks.

Normal hard disks don't do sector remapping, so your first failure will occur whenever you put too much abuse on a single sector (or when there's a mechanical failure). Modern flash drives have a few million writes per sector before failure, which is reportedly notably less than on a convenctional hard disk. However, flash disks have a clever process in which they track how many writes have been made to each sector; the closer a sector gets to a limit, the less frequently modified data gets put there (it'll move data around as necessary to achieve this). In short, you have to essentially make a few million writes to *every sector on the disk* before you get any failures. Let's repeat StorageSearch's calculation:

Write endurance: 2 million cycles
Sustained write speed: 80MB/sec
Capacity: 64GB

2,000,000*64,000,000,000/80,000,000 = 1,600,000,000 seconds = 51 years.

Is this really a problem? 51 years of continuous writes? Now, there are some nuances to the real situation (there's some write overhead on the disk itself, but then again, you'd need to be doing sequential writes with huge sectors to get that kind of performance), but you get the picture.

Here's the specs for an Mtron 32G SSD, which reports "greater than 85 years assuming 100G / day erase/write cycles" (overwriting the whole disk 3 times a day).

This drive doesn't outperform MTRON (http://www.mtron.net/english/). They announced 120 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write drives and they are shipping 100 MB/s read, 80 MB/s write drives already. The SSD-based Fusion IO card (http://www.fusionio.com/) at the claimed 800 MB/s read and 600 MB/s write speed would beat both them handily. Still, it's good to see a major manufacturer up its speeds.

http://www.mtron.net/eng/index.asp# - Just in case someone needs to investigate, looks pretty good to me

Write endurance

In the case of 32GB capacity Mtron SSD: >85 years @ 100GByte / day erase/write cycles