Quote Originally Posted by johnw
Lifetime throttling should begin after a lower amount of total writes on a smaller SSD.
We don't know how complex the DuraClass write detection algorithms are. 7 MB/sec of continuous writing @ 31,536,000 seconds per year results in 210.5 TB per year or 631.5 TB per 3 year period, which greatly exceeds even a 5000 p/e cycle rating on a 40 GB drive. It should work out just about right for a 120 GB drive though and for a 240 GB drive it would be overkill. Maybe they decided to use the same algorithm for all drive sizes and base it on a 120 GB size. OTOH, maybe the algorithm does allow for varying drive sizes and always kicks in at around 30 TB of continuous writing to a new drive, but only drops to 20 MB/sec on a 120 GB drive and 40 MB/sec on a 240 GB drive. Or maybe you get a 7 day grace period no matter what and the larger, faster drives will just write a lot more data in that 7 days. And of course each drive vendor may have a different DuraClass setting in the firmware. I would be very surprised for instance if OWC did not have a more aggressive life throttle with their 5 year warranties. That would make for an interesting test actually.