[citation][nom]caedenv[/nom]Let us do a little bit of math shall we?Windows ~20GBOffice, browsers, productivity software, and utilities ~15GBGames ~10GB each, and we will go on a limb and say ~60GB totalCache is equal to the amount of ram in the system so ~8GBSmall documents that you want to keep on the SSD for faster access time ~5GBTotal system drive we will round up to 120GB, which means that you need to purchase a 240GB SSD (because like HDDs you want to keep under 80% usage, granted it is for different reasons).On average, a cheap consumer SSD (read: OCZ and Mushkin) can rewrite 100,000 times per block, times 500,000 blocks per 64GB, times 4 because we are getting a 240GB drive= 200,000,000,000 (200 billion) writes to a drive over its lifetime. All modern drives have write leveling, so your drive will wear down relatively evenly.200 Billion writes divided by an expected replacement time of 6 years (that is my expected time frame anyways), and that gives ~33.3 Billion writes per year, or ~91.3 Million writes per dayThat is 3.8 Million writes per hour, every hour, of every day, for 6 years. If you have a higher end drive then the write endurance is a bit higher, and this is not including the buffer allocated on sand force drives (nobody makes a 240GB drive, it is a 256GB drive with a 16GB buffer for ECC and bad flash replacement over time). Personally, my desktop does not see anything near those types on loads as it just houses my documents (which are tiny), internet cache (which is admitedly heavy, but still nothing in the grand scheme of things), RAM cache (which is untouched because I have 16GB of RAM), Games (which while they take space, do not write more than updates and save files), and Windows itself (which only makes changes on the order of MBs per day)Add to that the studies put out by Google and other groups that own large server farms who say that SSDs last as long or longer than traditional drives. Yes, early failures do happen, so keep a backup of your important data (as you should anyways), but to think that SSD technology is any less reliable than a platter spinning some 5,400-10,000 times a minute is just silly talk.[/citation]
Actually, depending on the game, games can write a lot of data. For example, per map/level played (also depending on the map/level whatever that you're in), some games can write between several hundred and over one GB of data. Some games hardly write anything at all, but this is not true for all games nor even almost all games nowadays. How true or not it was in the past, I'm not sure. It wasn't something that I cared to look into before SSDs came out and Tom's has done a few articles about it. Also, 33.3B writes per year might not be a difficult number to achieve.
According to modern studies on it, the average person can write up to around 10GB per month (non average people, such as gamers, might write quite a bit more than that). How many writes that would be, I don't know for sure unless every bit equals a write, but I don't think that it is a hard number to hit. I'd say that the drive can take quite a bit more than that if it has TRIM and if we count the buffers and such, so that's probably still not a big deal. Besides, it's not as if many newer hard drives aren't far from reliable these days, so the less reliable than the average hard drive (except maybe for some of OCZ's previous drives) seems to be a myth right now.
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