512 SSD

Bimmer 7 Series wrote:

SSD Endurance
3K P/E Cycles	5K P/E Cycles	10K P/E Cycles	30K P/E Cycles
NAND Capacity	100GB	100GB	100GB	100GB
Writes per day	10GB	10GB	10GB	10GB
Write Amplification	10x	10x	10x	10x
P/E Cycles per Day	1	1	1	1
Total Estimated Lifespan	8.219 years	13.698 years	27.397 years	82.191 years

This is like the oft misunderstood battery cycles. A cycle corresponds to a full write and erase (or a full discharge & charge). You either do it little by little or in one fell swoop. In the case of the NAND cells on an SSD, the controller is supposed to be intelligent to spread the usage so all get written to and erased uniformly and avoid wearing out a section before the rest. This of course means that the storage area, which is essentially a flat space like the RAM, is continuously being remapped onto the disk/track/sector model used to simulate a mechanical HDD in order to make the SSD plug-compatible. And the TRIM stuff is how the OS can communicate to the SSD controller how it plans to use the disk/track/sector space so the mapping can occur faster and more efficiently.

Worth mentioning is that given the finite lifetime of the NAND storage on SSDs, high volume users like banks, eBay, Google, etc., who move massive amounts of data and will average far more than a single P/E cycle a day, prefer to use HDDs. Barring a mechanical accident, the magnetic histeresys cycle by which means you store a byte in an HDD does not break down over time. The lifetime of an HDD is dictated by stuff such as how long the motor bearings last, the head coils take to burn out or the head gap takes to erode while skimming over the platter surface, but the magnetic nature of the storage media itself lasts forever.

In a consumer situation, an SSD lasts essentially forever (doubtful you will be using the same computer steadfastly for the next 8-13 years) but the HDD might last till you drop the Mac in a drunken stupor. In a server situation, where computers are kept in climate/voltage/vibration-controlled secure conditions, no mechanical harm will likely befall an HDD, but an SSD will get written to death in short order.

Aaaw, you poor little thing... Aging to death while the Mac boots up.....

Have you tried going into System Preferences and setting it as your startup disk?

Clinton

Just go into System Preferences and set it as your startup disk - it's just searching around for a bootable disk until it's set. Boot up time should be no more than 15 seconds or so.

Clinton

You do know I hate you both, don't you????

You did get your 16GB in didn't you? Now's the time to start saving for that SSD!

Clinton

He's talking to me. I'm STILL green with envy....

But yes, getting an OCZ 1TB SSD would alleviate the feeling immensely. 😝

I've tried lots of SSD and i'm so pleased by the Plextor M5Pro 512GB lately (M5Pro updated its firmware and design recently) , it write and read really fast for large files and even small files. (it claimed it have 100,000 IOPS),

Here is the Xbench result, for sequential read and write, it beats every SSD i've owed (ADATA(good performace with a very affordable price), VERTEX, CRUCIAL)