I recently got a 990 Pro and through optimization / troubleshooting, I ended up re-installing Windows 11 about 12 times, which means always deleting all created partitions till it is fully unallocated space and then installing Windows again.
However, there was not much data written, maybe 2 terabytes total.
Does this frequent removing of partitions till unallocated space and repartitioning for Windows installation damage the drive / cause lots of wear or is just the TBW the actual wear and what I’m doing is doing nothing to it, in a harmful way?
My personal viewpoint on drives is to use them as you need to and don’t worry about failures until they happen.
For my homelab, I have two servers with 4 x 1TB SSD RAID 5 setups and a nine drive NAS x 1TB SSD RAID 6. I thrash them every weekend building and rebuilding ESXi vCenter and the hosts for various tests, Veeam backups, patches and upgrades. Never had any go wrong (All Samsung 870 QVO bought in May 2020). I do plan on updating the NAS to 4TB SSD when I have the cash as I’m space challenged at the moment, but until now they’ve been solid.
That said, SSD can go from fully operational to bricks in a microsecond, so keep your data backed up, have a couple of spares on hand for fast repairs and enjoy the ride.
No. Partition tables are written to the same available storage space as the rest of your data, it’s just not directly visible to the OS typically. Writing 512 kbs or however much 12 times to varying places in your SSD is not going to damage it. The wear-leveling built into the SSD controller will prevent it from overwriting the same couple of blocks over and over again back to back.
So creating and deleting partitions frequently is actually not doing anything to the SSD’s durability / performance? Just a write of 512 lbs!? That’s it?
Any drive is bound to slow down a bit with usage over time. With SSDs cells burn out. With spinning rust and magnetic drives parts wear out and mechanical drives tend to lose integrity. The good thing about SSDs is that when they eventually start to go you can’t write on them anymore but your data is still preserved. You can simply clone the data to another drive and you’re good to go. I have an old Kingston stick of NVMe that won’t let me write on it anymore but it has an operative OS on it that is practically impossible to delete. I saved it in my collection of memorabilia.