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by frizkie 1960 days ago
They do but it's really large. The Tech Report did an endurance test on SSDs 5-6 years ago [0]. The tests took 18 months before all 6 SSDs were dead.

Generally you're looking at hundreds of terabytes, if not more than a petabyte in total write capacity before the drive is unusable.

This is for older drives (~6 years old as I said), and I don't know enough about storage technology and where it's come since then to say, but I imagine things probably have not gotten worse.

[0]: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
1 comments
yread 1960 days ago
> things probably have not gotten worse.

I am afraid they did, consumer SSDs moved from MLC (2 bits per cell) to TLC (3) or QLC (4). Durability changed from multiple petabytes to low hundreds of terabytes. Still a lot, but I suspect the test would be a lot shorter now.

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Dylan16807 1960 days ago
The TLC drive in that test did fine. 3D flash cells are generally big enough for TLC to not be a problem. I would only worry about write limits on QLC right now, and even then .05 drive writes per day is well under warranty limits so I'd expect it to be fine. Short-lived files are all going to the SLC cache anyway.
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