Forum Discussion
Your math is a little out there.
It's a 2TB drive and the endurance is 1200TB, so you can erase the drive at best 600 times before you have reached the endurance level. However taking write amplification into account, even at 1.2 would put it at more like 500 erase cycles.
There is a tremendous amount of grey around this issue, but the testing methodology is kind of off too (the JEDEC testing standard for CONSUMER SSD's). From memory it's something like when the writes are 10 degrees celsius hotter than the storage temperature (40 working/30 storage), how many times you can erase the drive before 3% of the drives lose data after 1 year.
So, what that means to consumers, if you are near the write endurance, what the endurance is telling you is that if you store the drive at 30 degrees for a year there should be about a 3% chance that it will lose data. Most consumers would probably go ??? to that.
I used the word erase because that's actually what causes the degradation, it's not the writes. That's why write amplification is a thing. And a hot write temp and cold storage temp retains data for longer. If you were to take a drive at the endurance level and store it for a year at 30 degrees, it should retain data. I think it was like 10 degrees halves the retention rate, so if you stored it at 40 degrees you'd only expect 6 months...
The enterprise test is even crazier, enterprise drives are only tested to retain data for 3 months.