Or if that isn't an option (laptop?) a good backup-solution that that runs daily or more often is also a better and cheaper alternative.
Drives may dail at any time, but they don't age the way your post would suggest.
The setup is a bit more involved, but really not that bad. It’s a couple commands to join a few disks in an array and then you make a file system and mount it.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-crea...
On the other hand, how many years does each of us have left? Ten? twenty? Thirty? Forty? Few of us can easily imagine ourselves still alive and productive in forty years. So much of what we do rests on an implicit assumption that we are going to live for eternity, and starts to seem pointless when we consider how short our existence is.
I forgot to mention I do a lot of heavy writes to it. It is common to see me creating a huge 20GB virtual machine disk image, using it for a few hours, then deleting it, before creating a new one in its place. I'm a huge virtualization freak.
If you're losing drives that fast check your thermal management instead. Don't run your drives hot.
That probably doesn't have anything to do with write endurance of the flash memory. When your drive's flash is mostly worn-out, you will see latency affected as the drive has to retry reads and use more complex error correction schemes to recover your data. But there are several other mechanisms by which a SSD's performance will degrade early in its lifetime depending on the workload. Those performance degradations are avoidable to some extent, and are not permanent.
Assuming these are consumer SSD, the most important way to maintain good performance is to ensure that it gets some idle time. Consumer SSDs are optimized for burst performance rather than sustained performance, and almost all use SLC write caching. Depending on the drive and how full it is, the SLC cache will be somewhere between a few GB up to about a fourth of the advertised capacity. You may be filling up the cache if you write 20GB in one shot, but the drive will flush that cache in the background over the span of a minute or two at most if you don't keep it too busy.
The other good strategy to maintain SSD performance in the face of a heavy write workload is to not let the drive get full. Reserving an extra 10-15% of the drive's capacity and simply not touching it will significantly improve sustained write speeds. (Most enterprise SSD product lines have versions that already do this; a 3.2TB drive and a 3.84TB drive are usually identical hardware but configured with different amounts of spare area.)
If a drive has already been pushed into a degraded performance state, then you can either erase the whole drive or, if your OS makes proper use of TRIM commands, you can simply delete files to free up space. Then let the drive have a few minutes to clean things up behind the scenes.
For example the Samsung 1TB 970 PRO (not the 980 PRO) has a 1200TBW rating with a 5 year warranty. That's 1.2M gigabytes written or more than 600GB every day, and will usually handle far more.
Haven't noticed a single issue on it.
For my disk for my exact use case: ~4 years of operation. 88% of lifespan remaining.
Your mileage will almost definitely vary.
Yes but I forgot to mention I do a lot of heavy writes to it. It is common to see me creating a huge 20GB virtual machine disk image, using it for a few hours, then deleting it, before creating a new one in its place. I'm a huge virtualization freak.
The SSD in my current desktop, a Samsung 960 Pro 1TB, has a warranty for 800 TBW or 5 years. So that's 800/5/365.25*1000 ~= 438 GB per day, every single day.
And it's been documented the Samsung drives can do a lot more than the warranty is good for.
Either you're doing something else weird, or you're not really wearing them out.
[1]: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/c...
Also just because you create a 20GB virtual disk does not necessarily mean you're actually writing out 20GB to the disk.
Many SSDs and NVMEs are designed with total drive writes per day in their specs.
What is the wear method you're measuring by and what's the threshold where you're replacing your drives?
You mean like preallocation? I think Virtualbox now does that. In the past it didn't though, it just kept writing a bunch of zeroes to the drive until it reached 20GB.
Any particular provider you would recommend? I've looked into backblaze but it seems a bit pricey. Also: I am aware that cloud based backup solutions have very little failure rate in terms of drives since they're probably using RAID
I entirely agree that its not the medium of choice yet, if ever. LTO still exists for many people, perhaps 25+ TB hdd will make that moot.
So while they _can_ fail in a graceful way, that's not been my experience.
That is why I buy a new SSD every year and clone my current (worn out) SSD to the new one. I have several old SSDs that started to get unhealthy, well, according to my S.M.A.R.T utility that I used to check them. I could probably get away with using an SSD for another year, but will not risk the data loss. Anyone else do this?