An often discussed negative of SSDs is their lifespan due to the degradation of NAND memory caused by the amount of times it has been written to. Now a Taiwanese company claims that it has developed SSDs that have four times the average lifespan compared to other MLC based SSDs.
The company Memoright claims that is has developed its own technology called Endurance Write which should make sure that SSDs using their technology are able to have a lifspan of 20,000 writes instead of the 3,000 to 5,000 writes on average MLC SSDs. Their technology is firmware based and has nothing to do with the actual NAND memory.
While 3,000 writes might not seem a lot, manufacturers are usally conservative with these numbers and when used normally 3,000 write cycles should be good for at least 15 years (but usually much more).
Most SSD drives already have technology aboard that should increase the lifespan of a drive. They have wear leveling technology that makes sure that the write load is spread out evenly on the drive. Memoright claims that their algorithms are more efficient then others which results in the increased lifespan of their Quadlife series SSDs.
These drives are available in the unusual capacities of 265 GB, 530 GB in a 2.5" form factor and 220 GB in a 1.8" form factor. Usually storage capacities are factors of 2, these aren't, which probably reveals that parts of the disks are used for over provisioning, where fresh NAND memory is kept apart to replace unusable memory that is at the end of it's life due to too many writes or other 'damage'.
