Originally Posted by
Dodge DeBoulet
The longevity of SSDs has improved dramatically over the last few years, and now approaches (and in the "rough use" arena, definitely exceeds) that of regular "spinny" hard drives. I've been using SSDs exclusively in my laptops for the last 2 years and don't have any intention of going back.
I've been using SSDs exclusively [eta: in laptops] for something like 7 years. Longevity has NEVER been an issue for normal use; I've never seen an SSD run out of write lifetime except in truly abusive server workloads -- even in servers, it takes a lot of work to run out of write lifetime. I've never tried running one in a DVR -- that's probably the worst possible consumer use of one, and one where someone using it very heavily (e.g. a security system constantly writing) might have to worry about write lifetime.
The oldest SSD I have (an 80GB Intel X25-M, G1 without trim) is still working. Not really good for much at that size, but still working.
Every single failed SSD I've ever seen has involved a controller failure in some form. Usually of the catastrophic "bricked" variety.
As for write lifetimes, they've actually gotten worse over time rather than better -- newer grades of consumer flash can do many, many fewer writes per cell given the same write patterns. Better DSP algorithms can extend that a bit, and the FTLs have gotten better at avoiding write amplification, so it's not entirely down-hill, but it's all entirely irrelevant: to completely wear out even a "short lived" drive, you'd need to rewrite the whole drive 3x a day, every day, for a year.
USB flash drives won't offer the same performance as SSDs. Even USB3 isn't as fast as SATA3, and you'll find that the controllers built into flash drives aren't generally as intelligent at I/O operations as SSDs. For example, the flash drive you referenced supports a read speed of 120MB/s while a SATA3 SSD supports up to 550MB/s. That's a very noticeable difference on today's hardware.
Unless you're moving multi-gigabyte files around, that's really not a noticeable difference; nor will most people notice the difference in speed between running an SSD on 3Gbps SATA vs 6Gbps SATA. the random-access performance makes a much bigger difference; that said, even the fastest dedicated USB disks I've seen (and the Lexar P20 is pretty nice!) are pretty miserable for that.
I've got an old 160GB Intel X25-M in a USB3 enclosure as my knockaround drive, and it would be
almost tolerable as a bootable drive in a pinch, but the USB overhead is still kind of a killer. For moving bulk files, the ~150-200MB/sec read and write speed is more than fast enough for anything -- it's faster than the gigabit ethernet I'd otherwise be using.