On Wed, 2019-11-13 at 04:06 -0800, Bruce Ferrell wrote:
> Well, I was thinking more along the lines of the "early" failure rate
> for SSD and not so much the convenience of a thing as small as my baby
> finger nail with insane amounts of 
> storage.  I have active and still in use rotational media from the
> 90's.  SSD just can't do that and flash... We don't need to go into
> it.  That's what started this thread.

There is a big difference between SD cards, USB sticks and real SSDs
too. And there is another big difference between consumer SSD and
Enterprise gear. Here is some real world data. Drive has been in
pretty much constant use in production at a public library running the
online catalog and in house cataloging / automation / etc. since 2011.

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Intel X25-M SSD
Device Model:     INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GN
Serial Number:    CVPO0510036E160AGN
Firmware Version: 2CV102HD
User Capacity:    160,041,885,696 bytes
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   7
ATA Standard is:  ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 1
Local Time is:    Thu Nov 14 15:09:55 2019 CST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0020   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0030   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       21
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       71816
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       148
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       101
225 Host_Writes_Count       0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       414459
226 Load-in_Time            0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       184
227 Torq-amp_Count          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
228 Power-off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       3027407118
232 Available_Reservd_Space 0x0033   099   099   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
233 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0032   096   096   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0033   100   100   099    Pre-fail  Always       -       0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

So yeah I trust SSDs now in production workloads. It is in a RAID1
though so trust but verify is still the watchword. There are six of
these drives in the three servers making up our Evergreen install, all
bought at the same time and all still going strong. Unless something
unusual happens they are more likely to be taken out of service for
being too small than becoming unreliable.