blackhawk1928 I am not switching off my computer /because I use swappless configuration it can't go to hibernation/ for days, even weeks, and I have currently 6 HDDs attached to the system 3 of which external /sometimes I may switched off some of them/, ranging ~250 /the one usualy sitting in my docking station and I use it to move data arround, sometime even do video directly on it, but rarely/ to ~1500 GB /Hitachi Maxtor,Samsung,Seagate and WD as branches/, and the oldest is definitely older as 5 years. And they definitely last longer as SSDs, because there is something in the technology of the flash memory, some electrical charge or so, I am not specialist here, but it makes the memory to decay just by sitting, so I may be not absolutely exact, but a SDD can't be able to last longer as 10 years - it's by it's nature.
I also happened to work in computer laboratories, including ones dedicated for student use etc. with tens of disks arround, with many computers on very slow upgrade cycle. And I never had a mechanically broken HDD
. It may possibly happned in the labs, I can't be sure ofcourse.
The write cycles for MLD SSD s are considered being between 1000 and 10000 /no any way to be 100/ and I think 1000 may be considered a bad exception /100 000 for SLD/ but also there is special software, who moves the most frequently used logical addresses arround the phisical body, giving different addresses to different cells to prevent some cells to be accessed too frequently. I know this to work with the free space on the drive - meaning - a bigger drive with more frree space will last longer, but some safety mechanism surely works on the whole drive /so they appear to be some smart little things
/. So it's not like 5000 cycles on a specific cell /what may burn it in just days if used for swap file, maybe even shorter/ but 5000 cycles multyplyed by the size of the free space on the drive /or maybe even the entire drive - this is firmware related thing/ and divided by the size of the chunk of data you read and write simultaneously - because a byte is never written alone but in "bursts" and it may happen to be able acces just a byte to rewrite the whole chunk /at least that's how it works on HDD and how it works on SDD is pretty much a trade secret yet, or I don't know exactly
/... wow, I lost it
But the thing is - it's kind of complicated to calculate it, it hugely depends on these safety mechanisms which are trade secrets.