I recently bought an external PCIe enclosure so I could make use of a specific PCIe device in an editing setup. One of the nice things about this particular enclosure is that it also happens to come with an m.2 slot for NVME drives as well.

Usually when I edit with my home set up, I’m provided with the storage by the client, and even if not, at the very least, video media, plus backups takes up a lot of room and NVME drives are expensive so I’d usually opt for something cheaper as the actual location for the footage and assets. I figured then that it might be take advantage of an NVME drive of a smaller, more affordable capacity and use it just as a location for video render cache that I just clear after every project wraps. The high speeds of these drives seems like it would be a good fit for this purpose.

However I’ve heard that SSDs, including NVME are famously short lived and have particularly short life spans in terms of number of write operations. Is that still the case and would the constant writing and clearing of relatively small video files actually be kind of the worst use of one of these drives?

  • ShortN0te
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    2 months ago

    SLC drives have around 100,000 write cycles. Most consumer SSDs are QLC now and those have less than 1,000 write cycles

    Source needed. The amount of write cycles is dependent on the actual quality of the flash.

    Also sources needed for “most SSDs are QLC now” maybe true for bottom of the barrel cheap useless SSDs.

    Also, the amount of write cycle does not mean much without knowing how many flash chips you have on the SSD. A 1tb ssd can consist of 1 or 16 flash chips.