Yeah they write level, so don't use the same ram more than rhey have to, so they wear out all at the same time. You can wipe and write to a block 10,000 times maybe more before it fails thats a lot. Year on mine is reporting 100% all fine, paid £80 for a 240gb, guess there cheaper not looked recently.
There was a 2 or 3 year test of constant reads and writes. An Intel X25-V (40GB) had written 1.6PB (that's 40,000 write cycles) and was still going when they abandoned the test. Newer SSDs likely not that durable, but another test had all writing 600TB before the 1st one failed.. and that was the 840 EVO, as expected. Bottom Line.... consumers are unlikely to "wear out" their SSD, regardless.... even with occasional defragging. (My oldest SSDs have been running daily for 5 1/2 years. Intel Toolbox still shows "100%" life left.... they will probably outlive me. Oh, and I do defrag.)
Alternative suggestion.... Clone your SSD to another SSD periodically (daily, if it makes you feel better). Then if your rig SSD fails or gets corrupted, just plug in the updated clone and keep rolling. Depending upon how much stuff is on your drive, you can clone in 2 minutes or so with something like Acronis True Image. Acronis will also "image" your drive, but imaging takes longer and longer to restore. If you archive data, good idea to make backup copy(s) of the data onto something like external USB SSD. Even with a catastrophic SSD failure or corruption, you could be back up and current in < 2 minutes.
A little off the original subject here... When I used a desktop (not a laptop as I do these days) I used RAID 1. I found this to be the least hassle way to guard against loss of data due to corruption or hardware failure. (In addition I backed up remotely periodically.) But a word of warning: a few years back I purchased two identical HDs from one of the main manufacturers. I gave one to a friend and kept one. About a year after purchase both drives failed due to a firmware bug, which meant they were both no longer recognised by the BIOS. It turned out to be a known bug that affected all drives of that particular model and firmware version. I sent them back to the manufacturer who applied a fix and received them back after a few days, both drives fully functional with all the original data intact. Thankfully things worked out in that instance, however I now diversify my hardware.
I use www.carbonite.com sits in the background, backs everything up, lets me restore to different versions of files, cheap and very nice. Downside, if I have to do a full restore of my data which is HUGE it takes days to recover, but hey it's cheap and hassle free My stuff is kept on a portable hard drive and my laptop aswell, just incase. House burns down or PC gets stolen, Raid 1 won't help ofcourse.
Yes, quite right. RAID isn't fire proof... or human error proof. Leading causes of data loss: Hardware / system malfunction: 44% Human error: 32% Software corruption: 14% Viruses: 7% Natural disasters / fires: 3%
I use Acronis already for many years. Upgraded last year because SSD was not supported in my previous version. I clone my SSD. Can travel more easily with it because SSD is not so fragile as external HD. And smaller and lighter too. And faster!!!