TheFocusElf, I'm glad you're keeping things positive! Most people would be highly irritated or simply angry over the matter. Honestly I would be irritated, but as you said the chance of the drive bricking itself is small... small enough I would have used the drive anyway and done regular backups. Hopefully the "fixed" firmware and "fixed" software tool will be free of issues with their upcoming release.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssd_drive
Looking up disadvantages in the above linked article will underline why I think SSD will not be found in mainstream computing for a good while. Flash memory is good for a finite number of reads/writes. When using a SSD for windows with the swap file on the drive it hits the drive quite often and each hit is a nail in the coffin for the drive.
To help extend the life of the drive you can transfer the swap file to a conventional disk type HDD and save thousands of read/write cycles to the SSD.
I can say that someone has definitely improved the SSD wiki and removed some errors in the information, but it still isn't that accurate (even for a wiki article). For example to the best of my knowledge this is completely false. The "performance" won't degrade, in fact both of these technologies they name increase the lifespan of the drive.
As a result of wear leveling and write combining, the performance of SSDs degrades with use.[
All these "generalizations" made multiple times in the disadvantages section don't always apply. There are drives that write nearly as fast as they read (Vertex 2 being nearly equal). Even those that do not, a midrange SSD can write to flash faster than many high capacity hard drives can write OR read. Such asymmetric software would have been written with slow hard disks in mind, making such an argument further moot because almost any SSD would write fast enough to meet the minimum requirements.
As erase blocks on flash-based SSDs generally are quite large (e.g. 0.5 - 1 megabyte),[11] they are far slower than conventional disks during small writes (write amplification effect)
This one is not just wrong, but completely false. Hard disk drives are extremely slow at small file operations, in fact they are worse... by far. Any test will show it, but here's one chart:
Link Here's another that shows a laptop drive and a Velociraptor:
Link
"Write amplification" means something else. Write amplification is where an SSD must erase a "block" to write just a few "pages" of data to it. Say for example each page is 4KB, and each block is comprised of 128 pages (block = 512KB in size). The SSD must write the entire block to write just any of the pages in it. This is because an SSD can read an individual 4KB sized "page", but the NAND is structured (for size/complexity reasons) so only each block is capable of being written to at once.
As far as longevity goes, an SSD is warrantied for 3-5 years which is as much as any hard drive. Most people don't seem to expect HDD's to last 3-5 years, so having a similar expectation for SSDs shouldn't suddenly somehow become a negative. If anything, an SSD that just sits there powered on and only sees reads isn't going to experience wear, but a HDD still would. Admittedly that isn't a realistic scenario, but it should illustrate that drive usage is going to play a large in the SSD's lifespan.... so will the drive capacity, write combining, and write amplification of the drive.
