SSD endurance ratings act as warranty limits rather than death dates

SSD endurance ratings, often listed as terabytes written (TBW), serve as boundaries for warranty coverage rather than predictions of when a drive will fail. Samsung, SanDisk, and Crucial all state that their warranties cover the specified time period or the TBW limit, whichever occurs first. BIWIN, which makes Acer Predator drives, states that reaching the rated endurance limit is considered the end of the product life and is excluded from the warranty. Kingston uses a different metric for its NV3, tying coverage to the drive reaching 100 percent on its Percentage Used attribute.

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These ratings are derived from JEDEC JESD218 or JESD219 test workloads rather than actual user behavior. For the Samsung 9100 PRO, the 1TB model is rated at 600 TBW over five years, while the 4TB model is rated at 2,400 TBW over the same term. This pattern of doubling the TBW rating with each doubling of capacity is also seen in the SanDisk WD_BLACK SN7100 series. Kingston shows more variance at the 1TB capacity, rating the NV3 at 320 TBW and the KC3000 at 800 TBW. Samsung rates its DRAM-less 990 EVO Plus at 600 TBW per terabyte, matching its flagship PCIe 5.0 drives.