💾 Storage
TBW (Terabytes Written)
TBW is how much total data the manufacturer warrants the drive can have written to it over its lifetime. For ordinary gaming use it is rarely the limiting factor.
Flash memory cells wear out after a finite number of write cycles. TBW expresses that budget as a total volume of data written — a drive rated 600TBW is warranted for 600 terabytes of writes.
Gaming workloads are read-heavy. Installing a 100GB game writes 100GB once, then playing it mostly reads. Reaching several hundred terabytes of writes takes years of normal use.
Sustained heavy writing — video capture, large daily backups, or using the drive as a scratch disk for editing — is where TBW starts to matter as a real planning number.