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Lifespan of NVMe SSDs with constant usage
Let's say an NVME has the following specs:
Read: 14 GiB/s
Write: 12 GiB/s
And TBW: 2400TB
Hypothetically speaking, if the writing speed is kept to be an average of 0.25 GiB/s at all times, then we would be writing 21.6 TB daily (0.25360024). 2400/21.6 = 111 days. Is it really going to die this fast?
But then if we take into account the volume itself, let's say being 4 TB. Then we would probably be able to assume writing of 0.1-0.05 GiB/s at all times, I will take an average of 0.025 Gib/s which would yield me 2.16 TB daily or 2400/2.16 = 1111 days, much better around 3 years.
The reason I gave you this long preface is to say, is that the way this works out? Will the read speeds wear out the drive or it can be negligible?
Comments
Writing is what kills them. Reading might have an effect but it would be negligible, unless you are reading at very high rates then the extra heat can contribute to a shorter lifespan but with proper cooling it should be fine.
The drive won't immediately die once it reaches the TBW but if it wears out as per its specs, once wear reaches 100% it will start to use the spare space, which is usually ~10% on consumer drives. You can check it with
smartctl.After running out of spare space, the controller might still mark bad blocks and avoid using them, but then you won't be able to use all the capacity without some corruption and the drive is pretty much "failed".
Enterprise drives are rated for much higher writes before failure.
mine still running after 5 years.