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If you were around in the early days when the first people were brave enough to start replacing their system drives with SSDs instead of tried-and-tested mechanical HDD technology, you'll know how terrified we were of wearing out our drives.
It wasn't all paranoia either, early SSDs were more prone to this, and operating systems at the time weren't geared up for the job. Likewise, the actual drive controller technology didn't have the numerous safeguards we have today. Yet, as I write this, the biggest threat to your SSDs isn't wear at all.
Write endurance sounds scary, but the numbers are much bigger than you think
Add a few zeroes for safety
So I'm not going to go over the whole SSD wear thing here. The short explanation of it is that every time an SSD erases a block of memory storage cells and writes new values to them, those cells degrade just a little. After a certain number of erase and write cycles, those cells lose their ability to hold data and have to be decommissioned.
Once enough of the cells in a drive are worn out, the whole drive goes dead. Some allow you to still read data to allow for data backup, but for all intents and purposes the drive is now kaput.
There have been some cheap SSDs with truly low endurance ratings, but these days even cheap SSDs have TBW (Terabytes Written) that are far in excess of what most people will need during the useful life of the drive. Back in 2014 (as reported by PC World) a mix of SSDs from all price tiers were put through the wringer, forced to erase and write data until they failed. Pretty much all of them blew past their TBW rating and not by a small margin. Some of the drives wrote a petabyte before calling it quits.
Things have come a long way since then, so I expect new drives to last even longer. Personally, not a single SSD I have purchased has perished from wear, but that doesn't mean they don't go to the big motherboard in the sky for other reasons.
Heat is a much bigger enemy than normal use
I'm not a fan
You may have seen that many high-speed modern SSDs either require a heatsink or strongly recommend one. Running electricity through all those circuits generates heat, and that has to be managed, or it shortens the life of the memory cells. The TBW rating was determined within a certain assumed temperature range and exceeding it can have rapid negative results.
While I can't prove that it was definitely heat, one of my SSDs died a premature death not too long ago, and I discovered that there was actually an air gap left by the heat pad not present with the OEM drive you can see on the left.
Correlation doesn't mean causation and all that, but this was the only SSD I own that's ever died and also the only one where I messed up the cooling.
Cheap drives usually fail because of their controllers or components first
Anything can be a weak link
However, as a whole bunch of people who commented on that incident pointed out, that SSD was a cheap model (so sue me, have you seen SSD prices?) and the controller onboard isn't the greatest. It was just a secondary game drive, so I didn't need it to have the best performance. However, it might also have been that a cheaper controller could have a shorter lifespan too.
Other components like the DRAM cache (unless its dramless) or power circuitry can all fail too. Honestly, unless you're talking about ancient NAND technology or super-cheap no-name memory, flash memory probably isn't the weakest link in the chain on a typical SSD these days anymore, in my opinion.
Power loss, firmware bugs, and bad luck are bigger threats than wearing out the flash modules in your drive. So do the thing that comes easiest and stop worrying about TBW numbers.
The real lesson is to stop obsessing over writes and start making backups
There are two reasons to be concerned about drive wear. The first is that you need the SSD to work, and its expensive to replace. That's a fair concern, but as I've already pointed out, your SSD is likely to outlive its usefulness before actually dying. As long as you keep it cooled, and it wasn't a bargain basement model with unreliable components, you'll likely sell it or toss it first.
The second reason to worry has to do with losing irreplaceable data. In this regard, SSDs are no different to anything else. They can fail at any time for any reason. My SSD failed totally from one second to the next. One moment it was working, the next my computer wouldn't even boot with it connected. So assume the worst and don't leave important information in just one place for a second longer than necessary.
