This Is Your Drive, Don't Wear It Out!
Over the last 20 years the PC industry shifted from spinning hard drives to solid state chips, greatly improving PC speeds. While spinning drives tend to lose their ability to store data after 6-7 or so years, because of magnetic degradation on the disk platter, solid state drives (SSDs) don't have that problem. They are, however, still limited in some ways.
The industry rates SSDs based on an "expected write life" or "endurance." This is typically measured in either total terabytes written, or "drive writes per day" (DWPD), the number of times a drive can have its entire capacity written per day for its warranty period, usually 3-5 years. For example, a 2 DWPD drive can have twice as much written to it as a 1 DWPD drive. For a 1000 GB drive that would be a lot of writing to disk. Note here the amount of data stored on the disk and not being rewritten, is not relevant.
There are multiple technologies behind the chips in SSDs, correlating to write life, speed, and of course cost. Depending on the technology used, each type of memory cell can be written a certain number of times before it can't be written to anymore. To alleviate that, drives may contain extra memory cells to use instead, and it's common for drives to use "wear leveling" which tries to write each individual memory cell the same number of times, by moving data around internally as needed. Drives may measure their wear level for you as a "percentage of life remaining" estimate.
Typically, once a drive realizes it can no longer write successfully, it will become read-only. For the most part SSDs in PCs or laptops won't reach their "write life" limit. It is far more important for drives used in servers and/or which have lots of logging, backups, or other high-write scenarios, where using lower cost drives can lead to premature failures.
December 2025
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