Bill, you may have touched on this during your last build, but I'm not entirely sure.
I was considering increasing SSD storage for one of my computers. By default I was looking at a Samsung Pro unit. After a lot of going back and forth on how much additional storage I might need as well as the associated costs, I started looking at the Evo line. One of the things I was concerned about was long-term durability, and I was surprised that both the Samsung 860 Pro and Evo models offer a 5-year warranty (my 850 Pro units came with a 10-year warranty). I also noticed that performance wasn't significantly better with the Pro series.
I wandered over to Samsung's
online warranty info (scroll down to the table) and learned that the only difference in warranty between the Pro and Evo series is the Total Bytes Written (TBW) in terabytes. For example, the 860 Pro 512GB SSD is warranted for up to 600 TBW, and the 860 Evo 500GB SSD is warranted for up to 300 TBW (literally one-half of its bigger brother). As the storage capacity doubles, so does the corresponding TBW. For example, the 860 Pro 1TB is warranted for up to 1,200 TBW. The 1TB Evo doubles to 600 TBW.
I downloaded and installed
Samsung Magician to find the TBW of my current SSD, a Samsung 850 Pro 256GB model. My SSD (that houses the OS) is reporting that it has used a total of 6.7 TBW in just over 3 years. According to my calculator, that averages to a hairball over 2.23 TBW per year. The 10-year warranty for my SSD shows it's warranted for a maximum of 300 TBW. So far, I've used a mere 2% of the allotted total, with nearly 1/3 of the warranted years used up.
So, where am I going with all this? The larger the SSD, the larger the corresponding TBW. So if you're going to be writing a lot of data, it pays to get the largest SSD you can afford. Reading data places no wear-and-tear on an SSD, so it does not count against you. For average consumer use, I see very little reason to pay more for the Samsung Pro series. Since both series now carry a 5-year warranty, you may as well as put your money toward a larger Evo drive.
