[port3000]

Does writing to an SSD often really 'wear out' the device?

[aqfamnzc]

Yes, they have a finite number of writes. The controller keeps track of this so you can even see what % of your SSD life is remaining in that sense.

[port3000]

Interesting, thanks, had no idea

[shortercode]

There are also some cases where this can be magnified by certain write patterns or system behaviours.

I think there was a case of Teslas having these sorts of failures at one point due to them writing logs quite aggressively.

Another example was MacOS causing rapid wear due to virtual memory swaps if I recall on devices with smaller amounts of RAM.

[dragontamer]

Those Teslas were controller-less SSDs IIRC, common in the cheap embedded world.

Modern proper SSDs for computers do their best to spread out the writes (TRIM, and other features). They still wear out of course, nothing can beat physics. But if you buy a 2TB drive, there's a lot of room to spread out the write cycles that a normal user probably never has to worry about (no normal user is going to hit 500TBs of writes that breaks a modern 2TB SSD write balancing algorithm)

But it probably should be noted that embedded controller-free SSDs have significant write amplification issues. Embedded systems assumed you were trying to save money and/or compute... and also assumed you didn't do too many writes. So they really weren't designed for the write cycles that Teslas logging system did.

[mirashii]

Yes. Flash cells in SSDs are rated for a particular number of write cycles.

[sokoloff]

Yes. NAND cells can only be erased and rewritten a finite number of times.