[dillondf]

Durability has steadily decreased as flash density has increased. 10000, then 5000, then 2000 for standard MLC parts over the last few years as densities have increased. I'm not sure what Samsung's new 3D process is. At the same time, the voltage regulation and comparators used on-chip has gotten a lot better, making it easier to detect leaky cells so reliability has significantly improved for the erase cycles the flash does have.

The original Intel 40G SSDs could handle an average of 10000 erase cycles (for each block of course), giving the 40G SSD around a 200TB minimum life if you divide it out and then divide by 2 for safety. (Intel spec'd 20TB or 40TB or something like that, 400TB @ 10000 erase cycles, divide by 2 gives you ~200TB or so).

A modern 512G Crucial SSD sits somewhere around a 2000 erase cycle durability, or around 512TB of relatively reliable wear (1PB / 2 for safety).

I would not necessarily trust an SSD all the way to the point where it says it is completely worn out, I would likely replace it well before that point or when the Hardware_ECC_Recovered counter starts to look scary. But I would certainly trust it at least through the 50% mark on the wear status. Remember that shelf life degrades as wear increases. I don't know what that curve looks like but we can at least assume somewhere in the ballpark of ~10 years new, and ~5 years at 50% wear. Below ~5 years and I would start to worry (but that's still better than a shelved HDD which can go bad in 6 months and is unlikely to last more than a year or two shelved).

-Matt