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I have a samsung NVMe SSD 500GB that has a warranty of 100TB.

My application reads and writes 300G~500GB daily.

should I be worried about the drive faulting out after the 100TB warranty?

Is there a terminology for "how much read/write before failure"? (like life expectancy but calculated in Data Size)

mashuptwice
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bentrification
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1 Answers1

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Reads do not contribute to the expected lifetime of an SSD. Reads are easy. It is only data written that has an effect on lifetime of the device as it is typically the erase cycles that degrade the flash cells.

The term you are looking for is "Terabytes Written", often abbreviated to TBW.

An alternative figure that is sometimes specified is DWPD, or Drive Writes Per Day.

These figures are both closely related to how much data you can write to a drive within the period that the drive is covered by warranty.

DWPD specifies how much data you can write per day and still expect to reach the warrantied lifetime, if you write half that amount per day then you will double your life, double that amount of writes and you will half the life.

TBW instead simply gives the total expected lifetime of the drive.

Neither figure provides an absolute "it will die after this amount of writes" but they set the bar for an approximate lifetime based on your usage requirements and combined with your knowledge of what you are using the drive for. You could get lucky and have a drive which lasts twice as long as the figure, but you should be considering replacing the drive or having a backup ready when you get close to that figure.

Mokubai
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  • Interestingly (or perhaps not;) SD cards do 'wear out' on read-only. I'm aware they're a different structure but I never really understood why this is - ref https://superuser.com/q/1386352/347380 – Tetsujin Nov 22 '22 at 07:22
  • @Tetsujin from what I understand this is more a data retention issue than a physical wear-out on a read-only SD card. I am pretty sure that SSDs could suffer from the same issue, if they had not much more sophisticated controllers than SD cards. For instance on a SSD the controller will periodically move the data that have not been modified for a long time, which has the consequence to refresh them. – PierU Nov 22 '22 at 10:01
  • @PierU - yeah, I really don't know how it all works under the hood, but as you'd expect an SSD to be in a state of constant flux, a lot of housekeeping could go on in the background. The SD cards I used to thrash to death were in effect write once, then read the same 50MB of data over & over for 15 hours a day, playing back advertising videos. It must also be noted that they were the cheapest available, we bought them by the thousand, directly from the factory. They'd take back true bad batches for analysis & replacement, but most of the rest suffered after a year or so of constant thrashing. – Tetsujin Nov 22 '22 at 10:07