Which SSD wears faster: larger or smaller?

Hi,
These seems logical, however, I am still not certain:
Assuming we have 2 temp SSD drives, no.1 - 1,9TB and no2. - 7,68 TB, and we use exactly identical systems to plot 1 plot at the time, not parallel, bascially all the same conditions.
Does the smaller ssd wear faster?

Basically they all wear at the same rate (Terabytes written) but the amount of TBW they can - on paper - handle in their lifespan is different for each model so the larger drive will last longer under the same load.

It’s a bit more complicated, when you go into write amplification factor and the fact that manufacturers don’t all use the same methods of testing and reporting, but that’s out of my league. You can look for the articles and video’s from Storage_jm on chiadecentral.

Generally speaking, the larger the drive, the higher the TBW will be, but there is also difference between one model and the next. There are 512 GB ssd’s that have a higher TBW than some other model 2TB drive.
Fortunately, TBW is listed on the spec sheets, so you can easily check to compare.

Also, I would not focus on TBW to much, sustained write speed is imo the most important metric (not listed on spec sheets unfortunately, but listed in reviews like Tomshardware).

Unless you plan on plotting a massive amount of plots, then TWB becomes more important but in that case you might as well look into ramdisk options.

FWIW, I’ve used two Lexar 1TB SSDs in a RAID-0 configuration and they’ve created over 3000 plots.

SSD wear is directly correlated with the size of your SSD, i.e., 2x bigger SSD will have 2x higher TBW (for the same brand/model). Also, if you plot, 25% of writes go to temp1, and 75% to temp2, so in your example that 8TB drive will get less writes/TB during plot creation.

Within the same brand and model, typically you will see larger drives have more endurance. At least where the manufacturers are being honest e.g intel.

I learned a lot about SSD NVMe types lately. (That the majority found on the market is total crap.)


The smaller capacity, the faster wear out on the limited-number of cells.


They health percentage (%) seems to indicate the redeemable garantee left, at zero, you can no longer ask for garantee.
I have SSDs showing health at complete “red” at zero and still plots at the same performance. So, health percentage rate is an estimation for garantee, not from life to death.


If you let them run hot 24/7, sure that they will die or fail.
Keeping a favorable health temperature (below 60 C°), they continue working fine at zero health indicator.

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BTW, for anyone interested, to this day, I still have not killed an SSD. Have plotted and replotted and about to replot again (once compression is ready on bladebit). Stopped even looking at the TBW of the drives like a year ago. Way way over the warranty. Like 4 or 5 times the warranty. All of my drives are Samsung Pro’s or Evo’s, one and two TB drives.

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Haha yeah me neither. Just replotted 400 TB on a 600TBW rated ssd, now at 2.5 PB writes on it.

I have worn one nvme to the point where it will only plot with a fan pointing at it and a sata ssd that will only write at 35MB/s