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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't a 5 year warranty seem short for a super expensive item that has no moving parts?

Even a $50 drive can be had with a 5-year warranty and it's spinning metal with rare earth motors at 7200rpm.

In any case, I wonder if ebay is going "d'oh!" right now: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218811/EBay_attacks_...

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NAND flash can only be written to a certain amount of times before it fails. This used to be around about 10000 write cycles, but is falling as process size shrinks. Current gen consumer grade NAND flash is good for about 3000 write cycles. This isn’t actually as bad as it seems at first glance: on a 1.6Tb drive you’d have to write 4.8 petabytes of data on average to kill every cell, and the drives are smart enough to fence off failed cells. Also, enterprise level drives use more expensive but more damage resistant cells. On the other hand, you’d expect enterprise level drives to be subject to a lot more write cycles so that balances out.

Total Bytes Written (the amount of data that can be written before the flash memory fails) is often associated with a Bytes/day for 5 years. Client SSDs are around a couple hundred GB/day for 5 years. Enterprise drives are more like 5 TB/day for 5 years. SSDs are designed around optimizing that metric, which is viewed as an aggressive use case. A warranty should reflect that use case.

Five years ago I bought an iBook with a what-felt-massive 80gb 4200rpm drive. Today I'd toss an 80gb drive in an electrostatic bag and probably forget about it. Five years is a sufficient warranty for my consumer use, even for cutting edge kit.

around 97 (give or take a year) i paid $500ish for a 6.5gb drive

It doesn't really matter, as it will be dirt cheap in 5 years anyway.

After 5 years, businesses will have full depreciated the item for tax-purposes.

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