Yes, but it's a well-known problem. Pretty much the only thing that will write inefficiently to a SSD (i.e. cause a huge amount of write amplification) is going to be a database whos records are updated (effectively) randomly. And that's pretty much it. Nearly all other access patterns through a modern filesystem will be relatively SSD-efficient. (keyword: modern filesystem).

In the past various issues could cause excessive write amplification. For example, filesystems in partitions that weren't 4K-aligned, filesystems using a too-small a block size, less efficient write-combining algorithms in earlier SSD firmwares. All of those issues, on a modern system, have basically been solved.

-Matt

And we think that people should have that right. When other companies use the Ikea name for economic gain, it creates confusion and rights are lost.'

If they hadn't said "for economic gain", I'd consider their sincerity. But when you add that, it changes the last part to "it creates concern and money is lost". This is more a case of "someone's making money off our name and we didn't get a cut". It has nothing to do with the consumer.

I have around 30 ranging from 40G to 512G, all of them are still intact including the original Intel 40G SSDs I bought way at the beginning of the SSD era. Nominal linux/bsd use cases, workstation-level paging, some modest-but-well-managed SSD-as-a-HDD-cache use cases. So far wearout rate is far lower than originally anticipated.

I'm not surprised that some people complain about wear-out problems, it depends heavily on the environment and use cases and people who are heavy users who are not cognizant of how they are using their SSDs could easily get into trouble.

For the typical consumer however, the SSD will easily outlast the machine. Even for a pro-sumer doing heavy video editing. Which, strangely enough, means that fewer PCs get sold because many consumers use failed or failing HDDs as an excuse to buy a new machine, and that is no longer the case if a SSD has been stuffed into it.

A more pertinent question is what the unpowered shelf-life for typical SSDs is. I don't know anyone who's done good tests (storing a SSD in a hot area unpowered to simulate a longer shelf time). Flash has historically been rated for 10-years data retention but as the technology gets better it should presumably be possible to retrieve the data after a long period on a freshly written (only a few erase cycles) SSD. HDDs which have been operational for a time have horrible unpowered shelf lives... a bit unclear why, but any HDD I've ever put on the shelf (for 6-12 months) that I try to put back into a machine will typically spin-up, but then fail within a few months after that.

-Matt

Congratulations, you're in the top 10% of US drivers in terms of range driven per day, and shouldn't be purchasing a short-range daily commuter.

Anything else we need to discuss here?

The average is 12,500. 9200 is 74% of that, which I would say is quite fairly described as "not that much below". You drive 3x that much, aka, 2.2x the national average. "freakishly much" describes that well.

You have no ground to stand on, criticizing someone for their drive cycle when their drivecycle is far, far closer to average than yours.

Also, they seem to be mixing up the Model S and the Roadster. And they *are* more than competitive with their luxury siblings in terms of features, comfort, performance, etc. In particular, the Model S has gotten incredible reviews.

Back to the original point: an EV drivetrain is about 3x as efficient as a gasoline drivetrain. So you should divide the gasoline energy density by 3. It still looks like it's a much higher number, but that too is highly deceiving because you're comparing one of the lighest parts of a gasoline car with one of the heaviest parts of an EV and ignoring the rest. Look under the hood of an EV. Tesla's motors are the size of a watermelons and push their cars into supercar territory. No transmission. Just 10% of the moving parts. You can't just pick and choose what parts to compare, you have to look at the whole drivetrain for both. And EVs and gasoline cars aren't all that far apart as it stands when you look at the whole picture.

You said

In such a case, the upper end of J1772 is enough for all but very high consumption vehicles to charge you to full while you sleep, so you can drive another full day immediately after. But that requires multi-hundred kilowatt hour packs which would weight 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech

Reading comprehension fail. Immediately before that I wrote:

There are a couple other possibilities for mainstreaming other than fast charging, but I don't see them around the corner.

Other than fast charging. Completely different situation. Not charging on the road with a fast charger, instead charging at home / at your hotel / whatever with a standard 80A home J1772.

But here we are in the land of land yachts.

Once again, reading comprehension fail. Immediately after I wrote "which would weigh 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech", I continued:

It'll happen eventually, batteries double in energy density every 8 years or so (price drops happen too but they're more irregular and harder to predict) - but we're not to the point yet where this would be a viable option.

You really can't actually be this bad at reading... can you?

. Even if the charger only needed half as much battery as the car had to make up what it's not getting from the mains, it's still a hard sell.

Stop mixing things up. We're not talking about batteries for home / level 2 chargers. We're talking about batteries for fast chargers. We're talking about the addition of a $20k pack to a $100k charger to be able to buy many hundreds of thousands of dollars of electricity at a much cheaper rate. Why are you having trouble with this?

"Room in your house"? You have no clue what a fast charger is, do you?

These aren't little sockets that cost $50. Those are Level 1.
These aren't "a little box on a wall or post" that cost a couple K. Those are Level 2.
These aren't even the lower end of level 3 "fast" chargers, which are the size of a small refrigerator or so; a few dozen kilowatts is not sufficiently fast to replace gasoline for travel. If you're talking a 400kW** fast charger, the kind of thing needed to fill up an 85kWh pack to 80% in ten minutes, you're talking a device the size of 1-2 soda machines that costs about a hundred thousand dollars.

These are not things you're going to put in your home

Nor is there any reason to whatsoever. Why on earth would a person need to charge that fast at home? Seriously, what's the use case here? Fast chargers are designed to be the EV equivalent of gas stations - in public places near major roads for people traveling long distances.

This explains why you're confused about fast chargers having batteries, though; you simply have no clue what they are or what they're used for. Even the lower-end level 3 chargers are not for houses.

You made a claim, I made a counter, you made a remark that your claim still stands without presenting evidence. I'm asking you to present evidence.

In what way is a charger's battery pack the same as a vehicle battery pack? It's not even *remotely* close to the same use case. Weight is irrelevant for fixed installations so cost per watt hour is dramatically lower, pack size can be dramatically larger given the use case, which decreases cycling rate, the overall cycling behavior is totally different, the associated non-battery hardware on the charger is far more expensive, changing the ratio of battery cost per unit associated hardware, and there's only one format of battery needed per charger (verses a minimum of dozens for vehicles), with no need for stock, no need for consumer battery acceptance, and no mechanical swap of a massive structural component of a vehicle's body.

So please, explain to me how these situations are even remotely similar? In the vehicle you've got crash-safe, body-integrated, high-energy-density lithium ions with a discharge time of 1-3 hours, attached to 10-40k of associated hardware. In a charger you've got something like lead-acids stacked on a shelf, with a total discharge time of 20-30 minutes (in 10 minute or so bursts), doing so for only maybe 4% of the day, attached to 100k-ish of hardware, and with the battery cost being compensated for by lower electricity rates.

If you think these are the same situation, by all means, I'm all ears.

Not to mention, the charger itself is much more expensive than your whole car, and fast charges vehicles orders of magnitude more often than you have your vehicle fast charged.

Heck, if it's in a spot where maintenance isn't an issue, one may just go with deep-cycle lead-acids and oversize the battery bank. Maybe 200kWh or so. That'd make charging a model S only a 40% duty cycle and a full discharge would take half an hour, which is actually rather gentle for many types of PbA. The overcapacity would give you room for busy times when you have to charge multiple cars in a row from the same charger (if there's more than one charger at a station, it makes more sense for them to share a common battery bank). You can get such PbAs for about $0.08-$0.10 per watt hour. Running at an average of about 4% utilization (see elsewhere in this article), you'd probably get 5 years or so out of them.

There's probably better alternatives, though.

I have 4G now, and it is still as slow as 3G, which is as slow as 2G, which is as slow as 1Xrtt when everyone is using their phones and the pipe to the tower is full. I often see 10 - 30 Kbps during peak times.

During the middle of the night, 1 bar will get me 1.3 - 1.9Mbps on 3G, and 3 - 5 Mbps on 4G, but during the day, I struggle to get 100Kbps on 3G or 4G, even with 5 bars.

I can watch my download speed increase as everyone goes to bed. It's funny (sad) to graph my download speed and see it jump up on the hour, and jump a little less on the half hour as the pipe opens up.

Cheers

It depends. Charging stations can be loss leaders. If you put a low power Level-1 (120V/20A) charging station in front of your store, you pay about 30 cents per hour that a person is charging there. To keep a person in a particular shopping district at a cost of only 30 cents per hour can make very good sense to a city or business; even Level 2 charging (240V/15-80A -> $0.60-$3.20/h) can potentially pay for itself as a loss leader, depending on the situation. And that's just ignoring the reason most chargers were installed in the CARB era: good publicity. And not just from EV drivers who tend to do business with stores that install chargers even if they don't need to use them, just as a thank-you; it earns green cred from the general public. It's the same as a business giving money to support local youth organizations, or sending gift baskets to the troops, or whatever - you spend money to gain additional customers thanks to good publicity.

That's the cynical view. The less cynical view is that a lot of the business owners and towns who install them actually *do* want to encourage EVs.

It's true. It's a ton of work to do a conversion, and what you generally get is a sucky EV. You didn't even mention the climate control issue. It's sad what people put into home EV conversions in terms of time and parts and how little money they get out of them if they ever try to sell them.

EVs are best designed from the ground up. They're really remarkably different in terms of their demands from gasoline cars. You have disadvantages like the additional bulk/mass from the battery pack(s) and the greater need for streamlining due to the range limitations. You also have a number of advantages such as much greater freedom on where to position things in the vehicle (motors are very small, you can put the inverter almost anywhere, you can put the batteries pretty much anywhere you want, etc). So you no longer need that bulbous front end, but it's more important that you have a long, shallow taper in the back. But you don't have to worry as much about rollover because you can keep the battery weight low. The lack of a need for a geared transmission saves you space and gives you greater flexibility in drivetrain structure, but introduces its own issues, like the need for a parking pawl (or at least good handbrake!) because the car always acts like it's "in neutral" when there's no power. And of course there's the aforementioned thermal management issue - important to keep the batteries cool (the faster you want to charge, the more of an issue it is), important to spare energy on climate control, and you have some but not a ton of waste heat from the battery pack, motor, and inverter. So what solutions do you do? There's a lot of creativity that goes into designing a good thermal management system. I think the EV1's was really ahead of its time, with effective heat scrounging and reuse, a reversible heat pump for both heating and cooling, and then they made up for the limited heating power of a heat pump in cold weather by adding an additional resistive heating element as needed, and then put the whole system on computer control so you can preheat or cool the cabin before you get into the car, while it's still on mains power.

Why would a person need "fast charge for daily use"? What's the point? "Daily use" for most people is a couple dozen miles tops, and even low-end EVs at present have about a hundred miles range. And why would people prefer to drive out to a fast charge station when they can just plug in at home or at work? Or are you envisioning everyone having $100k fast charging stations the size of a couple soda machines dealing out the power of a small power plant in their garage? And FYI, a 25 pound supercap wth present commercial tech holds about 100 watt hours. Assuming *no* wind or rolling resistance or hill in the way, wouldn't even be enough to accelerate a 1500kg EV up to 50mph, wherein it would coast down (in the real world, it'd never even reach that fast). If your goal is to have hand-portable batteries, you need to use batteries, because energy density is of the essence. But the question once again becomes, why? Why physically swap out and reconnect heavy, high voltage, vehicular component when you could just simply charge the car directly from another car for the same amount of power in less time?

If battery swapping is a non-starter, then having a charger full of batteries is also a non-starter.

What's your logic?

Because if they weren't expensive, they would be awesome.

If they weren't super-expensive, and super-low energy density, they'd be great. But that's not the case on either account.

Time marches on. Physics says that it should be possible.

Where does physics say that? Where does physics say anything about price?