And is it possible to somehow quantify in an approximate way how many gigabytes the user would have to download before the SSD would wear itself out?
In: Technology
It’s not filling it up that wears out an SSD, it’s the number of writes to any one sector. They are only good for 20K-30K writes. Most SSDs have wear leveling software that makes it hard to reach this lifetime in normal operation. If you download stuff until it’s full, then delete everything, then fill it up again, then delete again, …; then after 30K cycles you might see errors. So don’t do that.
Possible? yes, lots of manufacturers list the durability of their drives. IDK specifically about the drive in a series S but depending on capacity and quality modern drives are capable of hundreds or even thousands of terabytes of writes. For example both Western Digital and Samsung spec the 1TB capacity of their high end drives for 600 terabyte writes within a 5 year warranty, the 2TB capacity doubles that figure. Will you realistically ever reach these limits under even excessive abuse? absolutely not. Not to say it’s impossible for the drive to fail, but you can expect it not to. Even if microsoft used drives that are half as durable and you kept it for 10 years you’d have to rewrite on average 30 TB a year to just meet spec, that’s the equivalent of deleting and redownloading a new ~80GB game *daily*. And that doesn’t even guarantee failure, that’s just as far as the manufacture is willing to claim their drive *shouldn’t* fail. It could fail earlier, or it could fail much later, in either case it’s rarely a total drive failure, usually more and more sectors just get corrupted over time and the drive avoids reusing them. Which usually gives ample time to the user to backup their data and replace the drive.
the ELI5 would be a notebook with a pencil and eraser, with heavy use it’s possible to write, erase, and rewrite to the pages so much that it destroys pages, but it’s unlikely for even a heavy writer to actually erase and rewrite that much.
You don’t need downloads to wear it out, the console keeps writing cache and memory images for quick resume purposes, which is actually a lot faster than downloading.
The cell write life is also much lower if it’s a TLC, about 500-1000.
So let’s assume it has 1000 write cycles on a 512G, that’s 512TBW. Assuming your daily writes are equivalent to quick resume games four times a day, each with 8GB write, that’s 32GB per day.
This gets you expected SSD lifespan of 16,000 days, forty three years if you keep this kind of usage every day. Even ten times the usage gives you 4.3 years of expected SSD life.
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