LifeTime of a Solid State Hard Drive (SSD)

Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) are incredibly fast. Nowadays, you don't replace your laptop, you replace your hard drive. However, there are a couple of things you need to know about SSDs. For example, their limited lifetime. Let's take for example Intel X25-M 80GB SSD.

Intel aimed to make it last AT LEAST 5 years under NORMAL USAGE CONDITIONS, the 5 year estimate is based on a ludicrously high amount of writes per day.

Only Intel guarantees that their SSDs will lasts 5 years at least. If you manage to somehow use it up before that they will replace it under warranty. However, it is totally unrealistic even on a heavy server load.

80GB x 100,000 life-time writes * (1 data unit /1.1 write amplification overhead) = 7.27 million GB lifetime writes of data. Write speed 70 MB/s = 0.07 GB/s

7.27 million GB lifetime writes of data / 0.07 GB/s = 103.8 million seconds lifetime writes of data
103.8 x 1,000,000/1 million x minute/60 seconds x hour / 60 minutes x day / 24 hours x year / 365 days = 3.29 year lifetime writes of data. (double it for the 160GB version)

So if you max out the sequential writes at a nice flat 70MB/s which is the drive's max, and it has a write amplification of 1.1, and you do that 24/7/365 non stop, it will last 3.29 years.

of course, to put this in perspective:
0.07 GB/s x 60 seconds / minute x 60 minutes / hour x 24 hours / day = 6048 GB a day written to an 80GB drive. every day, 24/7/365 non stop writing.