Nope, they don't, they show that a directory with a compiled kernel and its sources is far from 10GB. If you want to have usage statistics:
Corsair Force III:
The mentioned Intel SSD:
I would also give you the numbers for my Samsung 840 Basic, but sadly it doesn't report a lifetime indicator or the amount of data written to it.

Seems to me that you have no clue about the internals of SSDs.

You do realize that "one write" means one write to every chip in the entire drive, including those that are hidden from the user and reserved for wear leveling, right?

So yes, one write a day for 8 years. In other words, you can dump a full 100 GB of data onto a 100 GB drive every single day for 8 years straight without issue. If you're like most people, you probably average in the single digit GBs per day, which means a 100+ GB drive won't hit that 3000 write limit in you're lifetime.

When I first read your post I laughed, because I thought you were being sarcastic. Then I got sad because I realized you were being serious and there really are people out there that are this ignorant about SSDs.

I have only one desktop, with HDD.

As we seem to have moved off track a little to discuss SSD reliability and life I now have something to add to the discussion.
As I said in my original post I use my SSDs for booting Windows 8 (which I believe is far more punishing of the disk than Linux.
Here are my Crystal disk mark stats for my main W/S.
Model : OCZ-AGILITY3
Firmware : 2.22
Disk Size : 60.0 GB (8.4/60.0/60.0/60.0)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 117231408
Rotation Rate : ---- (SSD)
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA8-ACS
Minor Version : ACS-2 Revision 3
Transfer Mode : SATA/600
Power On Hours : 2566 hours
Power On Count : 755 count
Host Reads : 1271 GB
Host Writes : 1649 GB
Temparature : 30 C (86 F)
Health Status : Good (100 %)
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ, TRIM
APM Level : 00FEh [ON]
AAM Level : ----
SSD Life Left : 100%

So after being a boot disk for over a year it is still reporting 100% remaining life.

Let's think about this from another perspective as well.

Take a 300GB, 500 MB/s read/write SSD, a pretty decent, typical drive you might purchase for a few hundred dollars. You won't hit the 3000 write limit until you've dumped about 900 TB to the drive. A regular platter drive has about a 100 MB/s read/write speed, call it 120 to be generous. Assuming you read from the drive just as much as you write, you're looking at about 1000 hours of read/write time over the life of the SSD, and 4167 hours to read/write the same amount of data to an HDD (minimum, ignoring the horrendous random I/O speed on HDDs). Even at $1/hr, the SSD has saved 10x its value in labor cost waiting for it to read/write compared to the HDD. At minimum wage, it's saved over 60x its value in labor cost by the time it's worn out.

As Shadow_7 mentioned earlier, he's afraid of wearing out the drive within 1 year with heavy use. 900 TB in one year, removing weekends, holidays, etc., is about 3.6 TB per day. You're talking about 2 HOURS of write time on the SSD, versus 8 HOURS of write time on an HDD, PER DAY, in order to hit that write limit within a year. So yes, if you currently spend 8 hours per day, every day, waiting on 3.6 TB of data to write to the HDD at your job, you might wear out a 300 GB MLC SSD within a year. Then again, that SSD is going to drop your write time from 8 hours to 2 hours, giving you an additional 6 hours per day to actually be productive.

I personally think most of the concern over disk writes and reliability with SSDs is unwarranted these days.

Admittedly, I worried about disk writes with my SSDs early on, so I implemented just about every tip that I could find to reduce the number of writes that each one received, but over the last year or two, I've stopped worrying about SSD disk writes, and other than making sure the partitions are aligned correctly and using the discard option in my fstab file, I don't worry about them at all, and treat them like HDDs. Of course, as previously noted, all my data and backups still get written to fast HDDs, but that's only because they are still cheaper for huge amounts of storage space. Once the 1TB SSDs (or larger) have come down in price a bit more, I'll be ditching the HDDs altogether and moving forward strictly with SSD technology. I'm quite anxious to get to that point, too.

I've built/collected eight PC's and one laptop -- all of them having Linux installed -- along with Microsoft XP/Vista/WIN7. I go along with another writer who talked about the affordability of SSD's. Too much money for too little storage space, (IMHO).

When I built my current desktop I decided for the small outlay it was I might as well get a cheap, small 60GB SSD for the OSs (dual boot Debian Sid and another Linux[usually Slackware]). It doesn't disappoint -- dist-upgrades and the like fly as do kernel compiles from /root.
My other machine is an ageing EEEPC with two what I can only term proto-SSDs and while it's certainly sluggish it's not unusable and I really would be worried about slinging a spinning platter equipped machine into my backpack and running for a train or plane while the OS was still writing data to disk. I can't say I've ever killed a laptop HDD but I have always treated them with kid gloves until they spin down.
As for those not trusting SSDs -- for every story of a premature SSD failure or garbled data I could likely point to one regarding spinning disks. I keep an eye and an ear on technology and have worked in IT departments for a while and I don't hear or see any evidence of SSDs being any less reliable or any less prone to sudden, inexplicable failure, than spinning drives.
Money wise I agree with what has been said by suicidaleggroll and others -- SSDs are cheap enough that it's worth including them in any build where you can have your OS on one and store data elsewhere.
I'm a big fan of laptops but storing <500GB of data on one strikes me as a situation with fewer use cases than you'd think. A cheap 2TB portable spinning drive isn't that heavy or large if you need to carry data around and has the added advantage you an transfer data to and from it without your laptop present. Not to mention that in a lot of cases you want a little data on the laptop as possible lest it be stolen, broken or lost.

My point was that wear leveling doesn't move already existing data. So if your 300GB drive is 299GB full and you write 1GB a day, that write is the same 1GB of free space per day every day. You do realize that a write in that manner is actually two writes, since it implies a delete of the previous data, which is a write. And various filesystems that write last access times if you only "read" a file. Sure it saves time, but there are other factors, like recreating the data when the drive fails, since SSDs do not fail gracefully. And if your backup is a tape drive, usb stick, optical disc, or whatever, if you even have a backup. A lot more time lost from a different perspective. All of which assumes that the manufacturers boasts are based on facts, not theory, or the marketing department. SDHC cards claimed 10k writes, and I've had some of those fail. And some that boast a class 6 speed, but fail to keep a class 4 device happy.

It's all basically theory until you get bitten by that bug. But I do a lot of media recording and editing, and general fiddling with large datasets (media content). I'll stick with my HDDs until something else proves that it's worth the risk / expense. I still have a functional 4GB PATA (IDE) drive from the late 90s that functions. Not that I have many devices that I could plug that into directly. But that old tech has other uses, like when it goes silent, my task either failed or finished. No time wasted checking in on a long running process that might have finished hours ago.

Actually it does...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_le..._wear_leveling

Another one of the many differences between SSDs and USB/SD flash drives. Not to mention that many SSDs only present you with a fraction of the true capacity of the drive. While you might only see 1 GB available, the SSD probably has another 40-60GB in reserve that it can use for wear leveling.

Nope

So add the noatime and nodiratime flags to your mount command...it's really not that difficult.

Something else...like SSDs? As has been mentioned by basically everybody in this thread, you don't need to put EVERYTHING on the SSD. If you're doing recording and editing with these large datasets, you should probably be using a desktop rather than a laptop, in which case just run both. OS on the SSD so the system isn't unusably slow, and the data on bulk storage on the HDD.

I'm surprised that as far as I've seen, I am the only one who has even mentioned my main motivation for buying an SDD. I wanted, and now have, an absolutely silent PC.

I think most of the noise from a typical PC is fan noise (Atom processor--don't need one), but disks make noise too, and I hate it. I thought it was well worth the extra cost for the peace and quiet I now enjoy.

I've been running 64gb SSD as my desktop boot drive since they dropped below $150 over FOUR years ago. I still use my HDD for the data and storage backup. It's much easier to get linux on small SSD's than cramming bloated-with-patches Windows installations.

In terms of speed even the slowest SSD is much more responsive than ANY hard drive for random access. Patching, and wipe/reloading whole installs is far far faster, and running virtualized OS's for that one Windows program for testing is actually tolerable.

The downside is most laptops don't have 2 drive bays. So you have to either go external HDD or one of those new-fangled SSD/HDD hybrid drives if you need real capacity.


;TLDR
If you aren't running at least any SSD for your OS and Apps, you are missing out. Learn to managed your space and don't store those giant data files on SSD, they are waste of their random access perforamance.

Are you serious that one only sees 2% of the total capacity?