interesting. i am planning a mini music server and ran across this while researching SSD's. i stumbled across this by accident while tracking a link about enabling TRIM. here is the link, but the part i am interested in is in the comments (quoted).
http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/"Hyram
July 24, 2011 at 5:25 PM
ljun: I work for a major reseller, and we’ve fitted SSDs into machines since they were introduced, and long before Apple began using them themselves — I would estimate the number sold and/or installed would be close to three thousand over the past five years. We’ve had enough come back to determine that solid state storage is an inherently flawed technology, and that Mac OS X is possibly the harshest OS to use with it. Apple’s choice of SSD, coupled with their device-specific coding, means that Apple-shipped SSDs are about as reliable as they can be, but we still see a lot of Airs with SSDs come back within the first twelve months for a module replacement.
The finding that solid-state storage is flawed is echoed by many of my counterparts in the generic-PC business, as well as other Apple technicians I know and others I have conversed with. It has been exceptionally rare to find a solid-state drive in a desktop-OS environment that has remained functional for more than a year, and that six to ten months seems to be the average irrespective of brand … with the exception of Intel’s X-25 series. It is why we now strongly recommend to all customers who use SSDs to maintain a constant, ruthless backup regime.
What causes SSD failure is heat, and every write to solid-state storage is akin to a cigarette to the lungs — it causes minute, cumulative, and irrepairable damage. The principle behind wear-levelling is to distribute all writes evenly across the entire drive, as a single write cycle is actually a multiple-pass operation (read-erase-write-read-write-read) that applies to an entire block. Too many writes within close physical proximity to each other results in a localised rise in temperature above tolerance limitations.
The solid state FLASH array chips used in Intel’s X-25 series have both a much wider gate spacing on the silicon, and a much denser chip packaging material which is a better thermal conductor than the norm. Because of these two factors, localised thermal buildup does not happen to anywhere near the same extent as other brands, resulting in better temperature stability across the surface of the FLASH silicon and thus, a longer operational life-span.
gonzolo2k: Intel X-25 drives are the most reliable, period. As they are not Apple factory standard SSDs, the TRIM patch must not be used."
