I have been receiving questions lately from people who are puzzled when companies use different parameters than their competitors use to specify the endurance of their SSDs. How do you compare one against the other? Some companies even switch from one parameter to another to define the endurance of different SSDs within their product line.
I have found that Intel uses three different endurance measures for its products: DWPD (drive writes per day), TBW (terabytes written), and GB/day.
There’s not any real difference between any of these measures – each one is one way of stating how many times each of the SSD’s locations can be overwritten before the drive has gone past its warrantied life.
The relationships between these three measures are illustrated in this post’s graphic. You can click on it to see an expanded version. It’s all pretty simple. We’ll spell out the relationships in detail below, but in brief, if you want to compare Continue reading “Comparing Wear Figures on SSDs”
