[Discuss] Reducing wear on SSD drives - worth the effort and, if so, how?

[epp at null.net (epp at null.net)]

On 11/18/22 09:53, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:21:50 -0500
> Daniel M Gessel<daniel at syntheticblue.com>  wrote:
>
>> I've heard that some SSDs wear out pretty quickly, but I'm not sure
>> if that's real or just rumor and innuendo.
> In between. A flash block has a finite number of writes before it wears
> out and stops working. A flash chip is made of many such blocks, and a
> SSD is made of a number of such flash chips. Therefore every SSD has a
> finite write life.
>
> In practice? It's not something you need to worry about as long as you
> run fstrim periodically. Consumer SSDs typically will last longer than
> the machines they ship in.

I've only recently begun to use solid state drives. I had not heard of 
/fstrim/ prior to this.

Debian's man page on /fstrim/ indicates running /fstrim/ frequently or 
using/mount -o discard/, might negatively affect the lifetime of a 
poor-quality SSD, but for most desktop/server systems, running it once a 
week is sufficient.

https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/util-linux/fstrim.8.en.html

The SSD I am using, Western Digital WD Blue SA510 SATA, came with a 
5-year warranty and the MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) shows 'up to 1.75 
million hours'.