Question: I was thinking of getting an SSD for my Video streaming laptop, but the specs say “endurance rating of up to 220TB total bytes written” does that me total bytes are written, then the drive is no good anymore?
My laptop records and streams audio/video 24/7 and in a half-hour, for example, will write 20 GB of data so will process 1+ TB of data read/writes a day, so I guess that means I will be replacing the SSD in less than a year, right? Better to stick with an HDD in my case, right? Thx
Answer: The Total Bytes Written (TBW) is an indication only and does not mean that thedisk cannot continue much beyond that value. The SSD has a large reserve ofreplacement cells, and will normally enter a read-only state only when thatreserve is exhausted.
First false assumption :Do not assume that 1 GB written to the disk equals 1 GB out of the TBW,because large sector size may mean that the real value is up to 2-3 times that.
Second : Do not also assume that the TBW equation only includes data that youwrite, since the SSD also constantly juggles data internally due to static datarotation and garbage collection routines, so there is always a constant streamof wear inside the SSD, even if you are not actively writing data to the drive.
The article SSD Endurance Experiment has shown that good-quality(and costly) SSDs may exceed their TBW by some petabytes, but that someothers may fail much sooner.
An SSD under such constraints as yours will need periodic checks of itsS.M.A.R.T data, and has better be scraped the moment write errors startto appear. I also wouldn’t count on the disk locking itself in read-onlymode without any data being lost, or on how much time it will take you tounderstand what all those disk errors mean, since you will not get anymore meaningful messages from the operating system when the disk entersread-only state (a system drive will then simply fail to boot).
It is impossible to predict the quality of your SSD.Given your volume of writes, your SSD may last anything from 6 monthsto a year, or 2-3 years if it is much better than its rating.But I wouldn’t advise you to plan on it.
In short, perhaps an SSD is not the best solution for your needs andis too chancy, given your environment.