topic Re: Will Microsoft Silverlight degrade my X25 160G SSD in Solid State Drives (NAND)

Will Microsoft Silverlight degrade my X25 160G SSD

idata — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:39:31 GMT

I am thinking of installing a stock charting program called TC2000 which requires the installation of Microsoft Silverlight. Apparently Silverlight can be installed only to the C: drive which is my SSD. The app will update stock prices and charts, etc throughout the day.

Should I have any reservations about prematurely degrading my SSD's performance due to the frequent writes to the drive by this app?

HP Desktop Pavilion 160G SSD for OS and apps; 2 2 Tb drives for data.

Re: Will Microsoft Silverlight degrade my X25 160G SSD

idata — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:20:30 GMT

Don't be concerned about the lifespan of an SSD device on a stand-alone computer like your laptop. If you do the math, the expected lifetime write capacity of your SSD runs to tens or hundreds of petabytes. That's a lot of stock quotes. The keyboard, hinges and display backlights on your machine will fail from wear long before the SSD will. I have an X-25 drive that serves as system drive (drive c:) on my HTPC machine. It runs 7/24 and has done so for more than 18 months. Intel's SSD toolbox software reports remaining life is still 100%.

If you're really worried about it, however, even though Silverlight installs to your system drive it's not very write intensive on it's own (mostly a collection of libraries that are read by other applications). The application (the stock charting program in this case) may let you assign data collection/storage to a separate storage device.

The other way to look at it is even if the SSD proves to have a service life that lasts only as long as the 3 year warranty period of the device, the replacement will be twice as fast, hold four times as much data and cost half as much.

Enjoy your drive, and may you have better success at day-trading than I have.

Re: Will Microsoft Silverlight degrade my X25 160G SSD

idata — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:58:04 GMT

Many thanks for the detailed reply - sounds reasonable to me, and eases my concern about damaging the performance of my desktop machine for image editing (photoshop and lightroom) which is its primary use.