"Any modern SSD should be good for a few hundred to several hundred TB and may reach a PB."

Actually, even more than that - here are some examples:[1]

Intel SSDSC2KB019TZ01 ("S4520") with 8.8 PB of lifetime writes

Intel SSDSC2KB019T801 ("S4510") with 7.1 PB of lifetime writes

Seagate ZA1920NM10001 ("Ironwolf[2] 110") with 3.5 PB of lifetime writes [2]

Samsung MZ-76P2T0BW ("860 PRO") with 2.4 PB of lifetime writes

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notes/2021-q3-rsync.net_tech...

[2] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1402397708329967618

To be fair, those are unusually high-end products compared to typical consumer SSDs, and three out of four are enterprise drives where endurance is measured according to different criteria that inflates the number a bit further.

Those numbers aren't out of reach for consumer SSDs either.

Video editors have workloads that can write a ton for each project in 4k and 8k resolutions, if its pro res even more. First thing they do is grab the largest fastest storage they can work off externally.

That is a fairly write-heavy use case. But SSD endurance is measured in drive writes per day (over a typically 5-year warranty period). Rewriting the entire contents of your drive every workday for 2.5 years is only enough to put a typical consumer SSD out of warranty; actual failure due to write endurance will come much later.

Right -- but work externally is key here. Sure, you often have some stuff you'll do locally, but having external disk arrays is the name of the game if you're doing large volumes of video, not just because you want to be able to have a backup if your internal dies, but because lots of other people often touch your stuff and it just fits a workflow better to use fast networked storage when possible.

I finished the life of a SSD in a single year of regular use; it was great to find it should not happen, but it did.

What drive? What was the end of life behavior you observed? Catastrophic failure, or SMART data showing wearout?

Not the parent but I had this happen to me. It was a top of the line Samsung SSD at the time. Catastrophic failure. Was working fine then one day I rebooted and it never came back. I usually plan for failure of each drive every 2-3 years and buy them on Black Friday. But if that took out my entire 3.5k-4k m1 max laptop I'd be rather disappointed. It's $200 to replace a SSD.

So, that failure mode makes it pretty much impossible to conclusively attribute it to wearing out the NAND write endurance. You probably hit a firmware bug or failure in a different SSD component, otherwise you would most likely have been getting warnings from your OS about impending drive failure based on SMART data.

SSD wrote endurance is an unavoidable ticking time bomb. But it is nowhere near as unpredictable or imminent as many people assume. It's a failure mode that doesn't sneak up on you, and usually takes real effort to trigger. Other failure mechanisms are much more important.

I've had two SSD's fail on, both were "here today, gone tomorrow" type failures without warning.

Granted, been a while, but I do nightly full-disk backups due to the first such experience (so was well prepared for the second).

Intel 535. I was showing some alerts and the Intel SSD tool said the remaining life was ~ 5%, then it got to zero so I replaced it.

That model had a known issue with excessively high write amplification, for which Intel published a firmware fix: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18821/26452...

In general, you should be aware that the "life remaining" indicator may merely be the "warranty remaining" indicator. If the unused reserved block count isn't approaching zero, a drive can usually keep operating long past the official write endurance rating. However, in addition to the above bug, Intel is also known for putting a kill switch in their SSD firmware tied to the "life remaining" counter, so you might have actually experienced the SSD going read-only when that hits zero.

You're forgetting swap. Not to mention professionals in domains like photography, design, video, etc. who might chew through big files frequently.

> You're forgetting swap.

8 Gb should be enough for everyone :)

Swap and other system activity is factored. Most heavy workloads wear other parts of the system as well. As another user pointed out, truly heavy storage and scratch system based workloads want to use large externals anyway, for other reasons.

Yes. Don't RAM-max at your own peril.

That's not how SSD wear works because nobody completely writes to their SSD, erases it, and writes again.

You can't wear-level against blocks that are in use, only blocks that are free.

If every person I've helped socially and professionally is any indication, people keep their storage anywhere between 80% and 95% full.

At 95% full, all your write cycles are focused on just 5% (plus spare provisioned blocks.)

Think about how browsers consume all available memory and then readily push the system into using a lot of swap. I have to restart my browser regularly because of how much ram it uses even if I've closed every tab.

Think about how whole-system file content indexing is the norm, and all the write operations that occur every time a file is added or updated.

Think about how a lot of applications are just electron apps and they routinely update themselves.

Think about all the filesystem metadata changes.

Etc.

> You can't wear-level against blocks that are in use, only blocks that are free.

It only takes a bit of arithmetic to prove that this cannot possibly be true, or else all of those 95%-full drives would have long since failed, and QLC SSDs would have been a disaster and never would have been adopted by system OEMs that provide multi-year warranties. (And if it were true, then SSDs prior to TRIM wouldn't have been viable.)

You can include static data in wear leveling, and all SSDs do. It does lead to some write amplification, but that's already factored in to a drive's endurance specs.

I did not say SSD wear works that way. All of that is factored into the usage I cited—-swap, system writes, etc. do not wear the drive as much as you appear to think for most users.