Understanding SSD Positioning and Endurance - a good read!

Yeah, that is a good article. I used to say all of the time that you probably don't need to be concerned as you will outgrow the capacity of the drive long before you chew up it's total useful life. And generally speaking, I still think this is true.

For example, I have a 2TB WD SN850 drive. It's rated for 1,200TBW (which is a lot for a drive, but it's a high end 2TB NVMe). I've had the drive now for just over 2 months. This is the "only" drive in my box at present, so it holds my OS, my games and all of my VM's, and it's been the drive all of my benchmarking has been done on.

I've written 3,813GB to the drive, so 3.8TB. So, if we round up to 4TB, that's 4TB/1200TB = 0.003. So 1/3 of 1%.

Thus at 1/3 of 1% every 2 months, if I continue at this average, i would use about 1% of the drive every 6 months. Extrapolating that out, 6 months per 1%, means 6 x 100 or 600 months. 600 months/12 months per year means that at my current rate of usage, my drive lasts about 50 years.

I know that some of you are thinking, but if you had bought the 500GB version of the SN850, your endurance is "only" 300TB. In my example, 4TB/300TB = 0.0133. So, 1.3%. 1.3% every 2 months, means 3.9% over 6 months. If we round that up to 4% every 6 months, this means I chew up 8% in 1 year. 100%/8% per year = 12.5 years. How likely am I to be using this SAME drive, 12 years from now, at the same rates of use? Not very likely.

Also remember, "IF" i had bought the 500GB version of the drive, it would also not be holding 350+GB of games and over 300GB of VM's...because it simply doesn't have that much space. Which means I would be running on multiple drives, which means I wouldn't be writing to 1 drive as much, so my usage would be lower since my writes would be spread out among multiple drives.

I think it's important to understand these details, and you have to understand your usage patterns....but I think for the average Joe and average enthusiast, you don't need to be in "analysis paralysis" constantly worried that you are going to wear out your SSD and be worried that you should instead be storing everything somewhere else to protect your precious SSD. You paid for a very fast drive, and should use your very fast drive and sleep well at night knowing that under most circumstances, it will outlive it's useful life to you.