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.
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.