SSD Longetivity in a development environment

[Kelly Dev]

At work they are moving us off our desktops which are: .

Dell Precision T7500
Intel Xeon CPU E5620 @ 2.4GHz (quad core multithreaded)
24 GB RAM
10k Raptor Hard Drive

To these laptops:

Dell Latitude E6430
Intel i5-3340M @ 2.70 GHz (dual core multithreaded)
8 GB Ram (max amount)
500 GB SSD

(sadly, my personal laptop is MUCH better than this laptop, but for security we are not allowed to use our own devices).

The 'management' thinks that the speed of the SSD drives alone will make up for the differences in processor and RAM. Since I routinely have 3 environments open at any given time along with two web browsers, email application, OneNote and possibly Word and Excel at the same time, working with 1/3 the memory and reduced processing power... well I am sure you know how I feel about this.

I have three applications that I support. Two are in Visual Studio 2013/TFS for source control and one in Visual Studio 2010/Source Safe for source control. My local TFS is 10.3GB/79,843 files and my local SourceSafe is 5.11GB/85,236 files.

Whenever I get latest, I do recursive and if I am having any issues with my solutions, I will overwrite non-checked out files, otherwise I just get changes. Also, in TFS only, for each defect or project I work on, I have to create a duplicate of the entire application as my working copy. I have to get latest on the original applications at least once a week, sometimes more and certainly each time before I am pushing code to merge my dev branch with the main application.

Anyway, my question is for my purposes, this is a higher than average writes to a SSD compared to a home user. As far as I know, the SSD are not going to be commercial grade. So, my question is how long do you think with this type of usage will the SSD drive last?

Thanks...

Kelly

 

[manofchalk]

Damn... that sucks man.
You think that the higher ups would consult with IT or at least the people who are affected by the decision (I suspect they are one and the same here) before pulling off something that stupid.

As for the SSD longevity, wouldnt be too concerned. An SSD that large is going to have plenty of redundant storage on it to distribute wear as well as whatever free space there is, and modern SSD's are pretty resilient given the better firmware and software support since the first generation of SSD's. I cant remember which one in particular, but a Samsung 840 Pro or Evo was tested and it dealt with about a petabyte before showing signs of degradation.
Might want to dig into whether the particular SSD's in the laptops use MLC or TLC flash, MLC is the more resilient.