What kind of longevity can I expect from the SSD in a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display?

Question

Hi all,
I recently ordered a new MacBook Pro with the Retina Display. This will be both my first computer and my first Mac that uses a SSD as the primary storage device. As the title of this post suggests, what I would like to know is what sort of lifespan/longevity can I expect to get out of it? My current MacBook Pro was manufactured in 2007 and has a stock 160GB Fujitsu hard drive that has been fantastic for me over the past 4-5 years. It continues to run like a champ, and I would hope that a brand new SSD would be able to last at least that long. Given that the new retina MBPs cannot be upgraded or (easily) user-serviced, I am somewhat curious to know whether or not Apple's new proprietary SSD modules will give out/slow to a crawl before/after my new machine becomes completely obsolete. I have been searching for articles published within the past few months on whether or not the current crop of SSDs on the market are more reliable than those introduced a year or two ago, but alas, I haven't had much luck. Perhaps it is still too early to tell?
I found a few discussion threads on here somewhere where some users indicated that their original MacBook Airs, or other SSD-equipped MacBooks, were still performing quite well and responsively after a few years of use. Can anyone substantiate this for me? How long have you been using your SSD(s) in your Mac(s), and do you think the newer models will be able to last several years? I would greatly appreciate any insight.

Answer 1

ARealMac(PPC)User wrote:
...I found a few discussion threads on here somewhere where some users indicated that their original MacBook Airs, or other SSD-equipped MacBooks, were still performing quite well and responsively after a few years of use. Can anyone substantiate this for me? How long have you been using your SSD(s) in your Mac(s), and do you think the newer models will be able to last several years? I would greatly appreciate any insight.
While I think your concern is legitimate (it was mine too), I think to some extent, how long they last will be up to you. The individual cells in the flash media in an SSD have limited life spans, and SSD controllers have a variety of techniques to spread that wear around evenly (wear leveling). That wear is exacerbated by the controller having to erase a whole block of data when even just one page needs to be changed, and if not all the data in the block is still valid, more data than necessary gets moved (write amplification). To provide some extra room for all this reshuffling of data, SSD manufacturers build in extra space that's inaccessible to the user (over-provisioning), but it typically runs about 7%. (This is a good discussion of the inner workings of all this)
If you stuff your SSD full of files, so that there's very little room to do all this rearranging, I think you'll experience the slowdown you're concerned about. TRIM, which Apple's SSD's support, will help, but you can too. Allow plenty of free space on your SSD and perhaps partition it so that there is free space outside the partition (check this out to see what a difference it can make). You can't use it but the controller can as an extension of the built-in over-provisioning.
You also mention that you "will most likely use it to record several tracks and store my growing library of songs and videos." Why not instead use an external SSD connected via USB 3.0 for storage? They're relatively cheap, very fast, and keep the space on your internal working drive free. A BootCamp partition would also take up space, so you might consider using Windows in a Virtual Machine instead. VMware Fusion or Parallels would be installed on the internal SSD but the virtual machine files could  go on the external.
In any case, your data is more important than your SSD, so back up, back up, back up.