You're right however, most of the people who'll use this kind of setup is not ordinary desktop users.
My desktop has 4 disks (2 SSDs and 2 HDDs). My write rate for "Home" SSD is 3TB/yr. To keep the value low, I've moved VMs, big downloads and other stuff to one of the HDDs. System is on another SSD and it's cumulative write was about 3TB in 8 years but, I moved logs and high-write portions to another HDD to keep that value low.
3-4TB / year on the other hand is pretty in line with a Windows 10 installation's behavior when used by a normal desktop user, as intended.
>You will never download enough Docker images for personal use to burn out your 860 Evo before you would have replaced it anyway.
Considering other stuff I do, I could easily double or triple the amount of writes in my Home SSD, but VMs and other stuff already can sit on the RAM once running so there's no speed problem.
While write amplification is not a big concern anymore, building software and other small file operations can accumulate fast, so I still can't trust a SSD blindly.
On the replacing of drives, while a dd or rsync is pretty straightforward for a seasoned Linux user, I don't prefer to change hardware just for the sake of it, or abuse it because it's cheap and can be replaced on a whim. At the end of the day, I'd rather use my system efficiently rather than recklessly both in terms of resources and endurance, because being able to rely on your system is underrated imho.
Because of my Job, we torture systems up to and beyond their design limits and a little optimization can go a long way in these scenarios. I like to apply that knowledge to my systems to extend their useful life.
TBW is 600 TB, but you do 3TB/year across four disks, and I'll be generous and say you do .75/SSD/year.
so in 750 years you'll hit the rated TBW?
If you did a full 3TB/year on the one SSD, you hit it in 200 years?
Unfortunately, neither of my disks are that big. Home is on a 256GB SSD which boils down to 300TBW. System SSD is a bit older 120GB OCz Vertex 3. This model doesn't have a TBW rating.
As a result, if I don't do anything heavy, it'd last for a century in the best case. I'm not sure about OCz though. It reports 100% life remaining but it's from the skunkworks era of the SSDs so, I can't be sure for anything.
The numbers climb very fast when you start to develop stuff and enter compile -> test -> debug cycle. So, I'd rather have that endurance and use it while developing software rather than eating it while doing daily stuff.
Anandtech was the best site for that era with their testing.
It has no temperature sensor so it cannot compensate for temperature or understand its environment. It doesn't have a TBW rating (IIRC) and reports writes and reads in GiB. So it's somewhat limited when compared to today's drives.
OTOH, it's pretty dependable and stable so far.
[0]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-...
TBW is almost never a concern for desktop users. The Evo has 600 TBW endurance per TB of storage, that would be a full disk rewrite every day for two years.
You will never download enough Docker images for personal use to burn out your 860 Evo before you would have replaced it anyway. (For those unfamiliar with Docker, spinning up a 500MB image ten times doesn't write 5GB to disk!)