Originally Posted by
unmesh
Lots of good info about the hardware. There is an oblique reference to performance degradation over time with XP that you may have missed. Consider upgrading to Windows 7 or 8, both of which use the TRIM command to mitigate this effect which can be dramatic.
Yes I just wanted to let the OP know that this could/would happen with his current systems. It didn't seem like he needed the technical details on why it would happen. Little did I know that a discussion on the validity of the need for TRIM would ensue.
I think the number of writes before failure is significantly higher than Zarf says - more like 100,000 is what I've heard. Still, as he said, it will work fine until it suddenly stops.
High-end SSD's are around 100,000 per cell, while there are some now rated for 1 million per cell. Just for reference it would take around 6+ months of continuous writing to reach 100,000 for a 60gb SSD(this also assumes you are writing at full speed, which is unlikely), so it is quite likely you could make 5 years with average use.