> now nobody seems to care anymore, I presume you're talking about layman consumers here. > because endurance hasn't turned out to be a significant issue It

> now nobody seems to care anymore, I presume you're talking about layman consumers here. > because endurance hasn't turned out to be a significant issue It used to be a big issue. Keep in mind SSD capacities were pretty small back in the day, with 80-120GB capacities being pretty typical. combined with just less mature overall flash technology meant that per cell endurance was not great, and it lacked the controllers and capacities to do proper wear leveling, so the massive speed boost meant you could burn through even "good" SSD's of the day pretty quick, especially in the days before TRIM and what not where the OS was doing unnecessary excessive writes to disk because it just didn't know how to handle flash. At first, the tech kinda brute forced it's way through this problem by using increased capacities (A 100GB SSD for example will often actually have more than 100GB of RAW storage to account for cell degradation, though to what extent and the nature of the transition flash and controller and DRAM or not and etcetcetc are all compounding factors in exactly how that works out), and then through improved overall endurance, controllers, cache, etc in combination with improved software and OS policies to reduce unnecessary wear to drives. So hasn't really been an issue for a while, but it absolutely was one back in the day, even for the layman with a healthy budget. > That's not something you would have done in the spinning rust days, Yes people did. They didn't really have a choice (unless they're having some fun with RAMdisk or something) + HDD I/O was so much slower that it took orders of magnitude longer. Even when you weren't actively doing something drive intensive, the computer the OS was consistently doing work in the background (remember defragging)? > simply because the constant crunchy hard drive noises would have annoyed people It's wild to me to see so many people share this sentiment. Then again I come from a background of having 8x10k 300GB Velociraptors in my personal workstation back in the day. Those were... Loud. lol.