RE: Found on Slashdot: Wear Leveling, RAID Can Wipe Out SSD Advantage

["Musselman, Paul" <pmusselman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark-- 

Contrary to popular belief, the flash memory chips in SSDs are subject
to 'wear.'  They are limited to just so many thousand write-erase-write
cycles before the silicon of the memory cells self-destructs your data.

Although spinning disks are mechanical, the number of write-erase-write
cycles is generally viewed as infinite.  But most disk drives, if not
their controllers, are capable of detecting 'bad sectors' on their way
to happen and (hopefully) migrating the data to spare tracks before the
originals glitch out.  Reasons vary-- poor coatings on the disk,
sunspots, phase of the moon, cosmic rays...  In most disks, I'd guess
mechanical issues cause more problems these days than issues with disk
coatings.

With either technology, RAID or mirroring helps prevent data loss due to
a single (or double, with RAID "6") drive failure.

Paul E Musselman