Ars Technica:
How long, exactly, do SSDs last?
It’s a difficult question to answer because estimating an SSD’s life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more. TechReport…has been subjecting six drives to a long-term torture test to actually measure, rather than estimate, the drives’ service life.
The results are impressive: the consumer-grade SSDs tested all made it to at least 700TB of writes before failing.
The long term viability of SSDs has always been a concern so it’s good to see reports like this coming out that may put some of those to rest. The speed improvements of SSDs are definitely worth it.
How does this compare to standard hdd’s?
Backblaze did a study on their hard drive failure rate.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/
Realize, these are drives that are constantly spinning and hard to compare to the metric the original article uses, however, not quoted above, the tests they were doing took almost a year of constant writing to produce some failures and there are still SSD drives working with over a PB of data written to them so far.
Yes, HDs last longer, but I don’t think anyone is surprised by that. As Steve Balmer said at a conference once, “Backups! Backups! Backups!” (I may be misquoting him :-).