Question SSD TBW - Terabytes Written meaning?

[mxnerd]

SSD/NVME drives have a TBW spec, which means terabytes written, but what does it really mean?

Crucial 1TB P2 NVME drive has a spec of 300 TBW, for example.

Does it mean once 300TBs were written, the drive will have a sudden death? Or the drive will start to see errors or start to see performance to decline or the bad sectors will start to appear and the drive size will get smaller and smaller?

 

[Tech Junky]

Once you hit the TBW # the capacity will start to decrease / speeds / etc. not to mention lack of warranty for RMA.

Of course there could be no issues at all and no impact observed beyond the TBW rating.

The lower ratings are due to Chia farming going through drives like water and reducing the replacement costs by reducing the endurance ratings. When I'm looking at drives the bare min is 1TB because they tend to carry those higher ratings for warranty 5yr/1000+ TBW.

@Billy Tallis - what's your issue?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I think it represents the mean of a statistical distribution, rather than "sudden death".

I'm running a Samsung 960 Pro 1TB on the system used for posting this response. The other day, I made a careless error and initiated a drive defragmentation, which should not be done on an NVME drive. My TBW shown by Magician jumped up to 54 TBW. The spec for the drive is something like 600, and I've been running this drive for five years.

So I'm not in a panic that it will fail anytime soon. It DOES make sense to use your backup software to leave a trail, in the event you begin to see errors. At least you could jump back in time when you make a "bare metal" restore to a new NVME.

If Samsung specs my drive at 600 (I'd have to check again, but it's something like that), then the statistical distribution of failures would begin somewhere beyond that. 600 is what they guarantee.