lifetime of MLC SSD? [closed]

I've read in this article http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html that SSDs don't have a short life, particularly if they're big (like 64GBs, - would small and short life be like 64MB?)

that they can fail 2 ways... controller spreading writes across memory cells makes an error and writes to a cell that already had too many, or writes are spread properly, it fills up and literally one too many writes on any cell and it's gone.

Is that right?

I've heard most SSD users use MLCs 'cos SLCs are very expensive..

Is there any way to see the "health"(is there a better term?) of the thing? Do SSDs give SMART data as spinning disk drives do?

How many years should an MLC last just using windows xp? mostly browsing the internet.

not sure how yet, but should I redirect the paging file and browser cache to a spinning disk hard drive on another computer in the network that uses a spinning disk drive?

SSDs do report SMART data (although some of the SMART attributes obviously don't apply to a non-rotating drive.)

Even an MLC drive should last much longer than a platter drive. Intel says you can write over 20GB of data to the X25-M every day for TEN YEARS without exceeding its write capacity. Patriot actually WARRANTIES their drives for ten years (and their drives aren't even very good!)

The nice thing about SSDs as well, is that in theory once you stop being able to write, you can still read just fine...so just clone the drive and off you go again.

I would not bother redirecting the caches. If you're really only using the machine for browsing, you're fine. Just make sure the machine is in AHCI mode and the partitions are properly aligned (XP is /not/ smart enough to do this on it own!) and be aware that XP doesn't natively support TRIM as well so you'd have to do it manually. (TRIM is a sort of wear leveling the controller on the drive does to prevent performance slowdown over time.) It's best to use Windows 7 with an SSD, but honestly even with XP on a light usage machine there's no worries.

The important thing to worry about here is comparing your SSD to a traditional hard drive. All that really matters is whether the SSD can give you at least the same kind of life expectancy.

I was concerned about this myself when SSDs first came out. I did some searching back then, and unfortunately I can't find the link now, but I read some things that indicated that while SSD's do have a fixed expiration date from the number of writes, they're generally still going to outlive the typical traditional spinning disk drive. Of course, that might depend on your usage patterns, but it's still good to know.