I can back fenderman up on this.
I've lost count of how many Hard Drives I've returned over the years and I've always bought top quality ones, WD being my favourte and by far the best performing and reliable brand in my opinion. That said, I've sent back 2 x Raptors and at least 4 or 5 other WD Black or equivalent drives.
Out of the 2 SSD's I've had for 6 years, I've had 0 failures or returns. Yes I may be statistically insignificant but an SSD is a very tough device with no moving parts as Fenderman says.
You base your theory on the fact that memory has a limited number of possible writes before it dies. However, consider this. How many times have you had a stick of system memory fail? Same stuff. In 30 yrs of building my own pc's and running Memtest 64 when I have an issue, I've Never had a single stick of memory return an error.
Now consider than unless you have a high end gaming PC, the amount of system memory is most likely going to be 8GB. Compared to a 256GB SSD, it's going to get written to 32 times as often (256/8) taking into account capacity alone. Now consider that an SSD for a PC OS or programs is going to have very few writes, whilst for system memory, EVERY single thing you do on the pc, every program, every time you start the pc and start one is written into the system memory. That probably means system memory gets written to hundreds of thousands of times more frequently that an SSD. Lets be ridiculously conservative here and say the difference in written data is only 10,000 times. When comparing 8GB of memory to a 256GB SSD, the relative number of blocks of data written are going to be 10,000 x 32 = 320,000 times more often for the system memory than the SSD, and that figure is probably out and under estimates by a factor of 10 or 100, taking the actual figure more likely into the tens of millions of times more write frequency for an 8GB system memory stick than an SSD holding an OS.
So, all that said, how many times have you had system memory fail? I'm guessing probably never. Yet you're worried about an SSD that uses memory that's more robust (as many now are 3D structured for more wear protection), and has 320,000 less write frequency than your memory on my very low estimate above, and tens of millions less write frequency wearing the memory blocks based on the fact that my estimate is most likely a gross under estimate.
It begins to show, just how ridiculous the whole SSD's are going to wear out theory is. Yes put them as a write drive in a data centre, then maybe. But in ordinary circumstances, by all rights, your system memory should wear out far faster.
just my 2 cents.
and have various machines and am always striving to replace a slower hard disk with something quicker. My server currently has 8 500Gb 7.2k hard disks and 8 320Gb SAS 10k drives and I'm always scanning Ebay to see if I can pick up some 15k SAS disks. Granted my server has a differing use but as I pointed out above in a computer the hard disk(s) are the slowest elements by factors of 100s if looking at mechanical drives that anything you can do to speed them will give a very significant and visible improvement.
