Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Yeah i'm sure I read somewhere that the standard SSD now would still take more cycles or whatever before the controller fails than a HDD would. Plus once it does, doesn't it just freeze? The data remains afaik

As blocks reach their wear limit the SSD will mark them as 'bad' and not reuse them, it effectively slowly reduces the spare capacity of the SSD. Existing data is safe (unless there's some other catastrophic failure).

As for endurance:-

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

Today's commodity 2D MLC flash has raw wear-out in the 2,000 to 3,000 write cycle range.

So, if you have a 512GB SSD you can effectively write about 2500*512GB before the SSD would be spent.

To do that in a 5 year period you'd need to write 2500*512GB/(5*365) =~ 700GB a day to it, every day for 5 years. Unlikely in normal usage.

Even if you write ~100GB a day (still a lot) then it should last for 35 years, easily past the date it will be obsolete.