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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

EDITORS: THIS HAS BEEN PRODUCED BY SOFTWARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT - THE CONTENT MAY REQUIRE EXTENSIVE EDITING

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/16-year-old-sata-ii-ssd-survives-1-petabyte-of-writes-25x-over-the-drives-tbw-rating [tomshardware.com]

16-Year-Old SATA II SSD Survives 1 Petabyte Of Writes — 25X More Than The Drive's Endurance Rating

To revisit the car analogy, just as a car can run fine beyond 100,000 miles, an SSD can continue to function after exceeding its TBW rating. However, just as older cars may require more frequent maintenance and become less predictable over time, SSDs that surpass their TBW threshold may gradually become less reliable. This is due to the physical wear that accumulates in the drive’s NAND flash memory cells through repeated Program/Erase (P/E) cycles.

Information on the P4 is slim, given that it was released more than a decade and a half ago. Nonetheless, we dug up an old specification sheet showing that the P4 64GB, the model used in WolfyTech's experiment, has a 40 TBW endurance. Therefore, 1 PB or 1,000 TB of written data exceeds the TBW by 25X. The drive also logged over 60,000 power-on hours and over 1,100 power-ups. It would seem that the user created a workload that kept making cached writes to the SSD.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an SSD outlive the manufacturer's specified TBW limit. If you look online, you'll find many SSD endurance tests that challenge the conservative TBW numbers that vendor slap on their products. However, this particular case was pretty interesting, given that it was on an older drive with MLC NAND that has since disappeared from the market.

Even though your SSD will likely have a longer lifespan than its TBW rating, it doesn't mean you should carelessly push your SSD to its breaking point. On the contrary, given the current market situation, you should be taking extra good care of your SSD.

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