said by pnjunction:The same trends that make them cheaper (smaller lithography, multi-level cells) also reduce the number the write cycles, but I wouldn't worry about it unless you are really thrashing at it.
I have had a 120GB SSD in my laptop for almost a year now and have only written 1.6 TB to it. The Intel tool says lifetime is still 100%. If we assume good wear-leveling, minimal write amplification and 3,000 write cycles per cell, the lifetime writes could be 360TB.
I only use this thing for browsing and office work, it's hard to imagine racking up the TB's doing that. It could happen if you are editing video and such, so I might not recommend an SSD for that but you could probably still get away with it if you are replacing it every few years anyways.
With my laptop, I was planning on getting a second hard drive for the drive bay (as I don't use the multi-burner that much) and use the SSD drive as my boot up drive with apps. The second hard drive will have my movies and music for when traveling, which is what I'll be using the lappy for mainly and surfing the net at the airport. It will also be used for downloading pictures from my digital camera, probably adjusting the pictures for red eyes, etc. I was planning on getting a 120 GB SSD.
