someone said writing video to the HD (SSD) so much could wear it out. Do you agree? The workaround would be to save it to an external drive but then I have to keep the external with the laptop all the time and its a hassle just for monitoring the day.
Solid-state and mechanical drives wear out differently. Pick your poison.
SSD's wear out purely by writing, and they fail in two ways:
- Slowly shrinking to eventually match the capacity to the actual data stored at that moment.
- Reading back something different from what was written.
Of course, the preferable failure mode is #1, and they're designed to do that if at all possible, but #2 has still been known to happen.
(actually, #2 is pretty much guaranteed internally, and the drive figures that out and converts it to #1 by recovering it to a new internal location and fixing up its access tables so that you don't know the difference...and the failed section becomes unavailable forever)
Spinning platters have a number of different failure modes, ranging from bearing failure, to a head crash, to whatever. Some give you warning; others just happen out of the blue. But there's no limit to the amount of data that they can handle over time.
How exactly does the replay buffer work?
I've never actually used it, but my understanding is that it's a RAM buffer that gets flushed to disk somewhat rarely. Someone else probably knows better.
