Have you ever actually worn out an SSD using personal workloads (ie, not on a server)? I haven't yet and I own machines/SSDs from 12 years ago - benchmarks are still roughly equivalent to what I had to start.

Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones).

I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had to adapt.

Those early SSDs if I remember right had very low cycle limits, the limits now are over 10x better than they were then.

Depends which age/tech.

Every additional 'Level' in the flash decreases the overall life cycle. Mind you, oftentimes drive controllers are fancier, often doing things like treating one of the sections as a less dense flash type to improve write cycles, and keep/move longer held data into the regions treated as QLC.

But, that means that some heavy write patters will indeed wind up worse on a modern drive than the better MLC/TLC models.

Its the other way around. Early SSDs had huge P/E numbers in tens of thousands (SLC). Now we are down in the low hundreds.

To re-iterate how much more reliable SSDs are now that they used to be, until about a month ago I worked for a vendor of hardware/software that is designed to read/write to disks hundreds of thousands of times per second (log collection and searching). When I first started working there ~5 years ago, they were testing out SSDs in the appliances and the team ultimately decided against it because they estimated the SSDs would burn out in under a year.

By the time I left they were shipping appliances with SSDs that were predicted to have lifespans longer than the longest hardware support you could buy from the vendor (longest hardware support contract - seven years). Hundreds of thousands of writes per second, every second, for 7+ years, uninterrupted.

They are most likely shipping bigger SSDs :-) Bigger the disk bigger the TBW despite P/E going to shits with every node shrink/bits per cell jump.

Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD?

The SSDs from the previous gen are rated for something like 40Gb writes per day for 40 years i think.

I’d guess the battery will fail first, then the keyboard or screen hinge, then the logic board. But thats a pure guess.

I reckon the biggest risk is that all in one logic board, anything fails and you lose your HDD.

> Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD?

Obsolete, who defines that?

I'm typing this on a MBP 2015. Still works perfectly fine (I did have screen replaced under warranty). Battery is replaceable on this machine, its sitting at ~85% capacity with 500 cycles. Apple hardware tends to have good resale value, too.

Performance-wise, hardware tends to last longer and longer. Repairability-wise, yeah, that's a can of worms of a discussion.

I'd say a 2005 PowerPC iBook is obsolete. I'd also say a 2009 intel macbook is obsolete but the truth is, add an SSD into that and it's probably still fine under linux so maybe 2009 isn't obsolete for some users just yet (although i think apple no longer support that hardware). 2015 is modern, intel performance just hasn't changed that much since 2015.