> Update 2: It looks like even if disabling the Secure Boot functionality, the T2 chip is reportedly still blocking operating systems aside from macOS and Windows 10.
That seems to contradict your claim, and I haven't seen that refuted elsewhere.
Which also means the entire thing has to be thrown out when the SSD eventually dies. Sure it's going to take a while, but it will happen. Yay consumerism, I guess.
In late 2014 I replaced the disks in my 2008 Mac Pro at work and my 2009 Mac Pro at home with Samsung EVO 840 and 850 SSD disks. I kept track of accumulated writes.
Both machines were heavily used for development and consumer type stuff. No big data stuff or big media stuff.
Samsung rates these things at 150 TB write endurance for the 850 and something around 120 TB for the 840.
My projection based on that usage is that it will take over 35 years to reach 100 TB.
Samsung's ratings are quite conservative. Reviewers that have put these things through write torture tests to the point of error have typically gotten several times Samsung's rating. Around 170 years worth of writes at my usage rate.
I haven't seen numbers for Apple's durability, but if it is within even distant sight of Samsung's EVO performance you can expect to have retired the computer for other reasons long before the SSD dies.
I'd expect that the only reason the SSD might lead to getting a new computer is that you want a bigger SSD, but even that might not be an issue because Thunderbolt 3 gives pretty good performance for external disks.
My Mac Pros have both been retired, replaced with a 2017 iMac (one iMac could replace both office and work computer because we switched to working at home). My Samsung EVOs are now on the iMac in an AKiTiO Thunder3 Quad Mini enclosure.
The internal SSD in the iMac gets just short of 2000 MB/s for both read and write, according to Disk Speed Test from Blackmagic Design. The Samsung EVOs get around 465 MB/s write, 520 MB/s read, so 1/4 the internal disk but still fast enough for most purposes.
Note that the Samsungs are SATA drives. Something that made more direct use of TB3 could probably go much faster.
Technically not. You can boot from an external thunderbolt SSD, which is capable of the same speeds as an internal drive. It’s mildly ugly, but not a showstopper.
But I thought that modern SSDs were supposed to last decades, even under heavy use. Is this actually a real problem?
My wife is using her iMac with an external SSD via USB3 since the HDD is too slow. She even can boot her Macbook Air from the macOS installation on that same SSD and keep working.
