Somewhere on teh intarwebs BillW50 wrote:
> In
> news:118800f7-dc61-4538-9918-f64e8cfaf6e6@t11g2000vbc.googlegroups.com,
> Roy typed on Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:09:47 -0700 (PDT):
>> How about durability and risk of drive failure are there already
>> known issues with these kind of storage facilties?
>
> Hard drives can fail in a couple of days (rare, but it happens) and
> SSD can fail in a couple of days too (also rare, but can happen). The
> important thing is SSD longevity is mostly govern by write cycles. A
> SLC SSD lasts for 100,000 complete writes. Meaning if you overwrote
> the whole SSD 24 times per day, it would take 11 years to burn it out.
> Normal use though, it would take 227 years to get there.

I am amazed at how much Windows (XP Pro in my case) actually reads and
writes to disk. I put a new Seagate 160GB 5400.3 HDD in my R51 ThinkPad at
the end of last year and also have Hard Disk Sentinel (HDS) installed. HDS
is an excellent disk monitoring utility that I highly recommend.

I've just checked it's logs and, bearing in mind that my boot and programmes
partitions are 10GB and 15GB respectively and that the rest is for data
storage and doesn't get written to or read all that often I was surprised to
find the following:

Power on time: 183 days 18 hours.

Average reads per day: 117.3GB
Average writes per day: 70.42GB

Total data read since installation: 25,271.25GB
Total data written since installation: 15,210.19GB

Considering that, as I said, most of the drive is storage, that data log is
essentially for a 25GB HDD!

Ok, I do use my laptop for bittorrents but I have a daily data cap with my
ISP of 1GB and I don't alwasy use it all by any means so I don't think that
it impacts hugely on the above figures.

Cheers,
--
Shaun.

"Build a man a fire, and he`ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and
he`ll be warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchett, Jingo.