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For something like Final Cut Pro where you have scratch disks, is it absolutely a bad idea to use a solid state drive? There would be a lot of writing, but I'm thinking it would be less for video editing then say, programming? The read/write cycles for SSDs still seem pretty long...

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With normal usage a SSD nowadays survives about as long as a hard drive. Or so vendors tell us. So the write cycle thing should be sufficient for anything you attempt and wear-leveling causes writes to appear all over the SSD instead of hot spots.

And scratch disks aren't that different from normal temporary file usage or the page file for example. Both haven't killed my SSD so far.

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  • That's good to hear! Do all SSDs employ wear-leveling?
    – Kato
    Commented Oct 23, 2009 at 9:47
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    As far as I know they do. The technique is pretty widespread already in other Flash-based media such as memory cards so applying it to SSDs is only natural.
    – Joey
    Commented Oct 24, 2009 at 19:20
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Intel's wear-leveling algorithms are that good that they guarantee that you can write 100GB per day for 5 years without loss of data. That would suggest that using one as a scratch disk would be just fine and would certainly boost your system's performance.

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