Digital Home Thoughts: Maximize The Life Of Your SSD

"All SSDs have a limited number of writes before they wear out. As we've pointed out, most modern SSDs will become outdated before they die, but that doesn't mean you can't make a few adjustments to maximize the life of your SSD-if nothing else as a safety precaution."

A Solid-State Drive (SSD) is a physical storage medium that uses microchips to store data, in a very similar way your portable USB flash drives do. Their, at least potential, advantage over the traditional "spinning disk" drives with magnetic read/write heads is that they have no moving parts, are much quieter, more durable, and are faster. They are not, however, completely fail-safe. Lifehacker has written another nice, fairly in-depth, technology article, this time on SSDs and how to maximize their lifespan. There are number of proactive steps you can take, including carefully configuring the way your operating system uses the drive, and monitoring applications that write heavily to the drive. The Read link will provide some interesting reading on these steadily proliferating drives, as well as links to additional articles they have written about this technology. It's all good reading.