My buddy wanted a small, cheap SSD for the boot/system drive in his 24/7 Mythtv box. He uses mechanical drives for storing the actual recordings and videos, so this drive would just hold the boot files, programs etc, and mysql database. Plus daily backups of the mysql database.

So I found him one from the pile here, a demo unit I received from the first generation of Indilinx based drives: OCZ Vertex 60GB, with MLC flash. About four (?) years old, formerly used in my own Mythtv box for the same purpose.

A month later, my buddy rings up in a panic: dead!

Turns out I made a tiny error setting up the crontab entry for the mysql backups.. rather than once a day, it was doing them once a minute.. oops.

That's at least 150MBytes of churn, more likely 500MBytes with mysql inefficiencies, once a minute, continuously for about 35 days. 7.5TB - 25TB. On top of "normal" system activity.

So, if you want to kill a small, used SSD, there's a good recipe!