Hard Drives have TBW limits too2025-08-25, 2mins, License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Every so often people talk about drives and how SSDs are worse because they have a terabytes written (TBW) limit, except hard drives have them too! Most manufacturers however either just don't publish the ratings or use a different term. The term is usually a workload rate limit (WRL). You can read more about this from WD here and from Seagate here. The WRL can be roughly converted to a TBW rating by multiplying the WRL by the years of the warranty. Notably this number seems to not scale with drive size like it does with SSDs.
- Here is a prosumer WD Red Plus drive, they have a 3 year warranty and a WRL of 180TB, so that is a TBW rating of 540TBW.
- Here is a prosumer Seagate Ironwolf drive, they have a 3 year warranty and a WRL of 180TB, so that is a TBW rating of 540TBW.
- Here is a enterprise Seagate Ironwolf Pro drive, they have a 5 year warranty and a WRL of 300TB, so that is a TBW rating of 1500TBW.
- Here is a enterprise WD Gold drive, they have a 5 year warranty and a WRL of 550TB, so that is a TBW rating of 2750TBW.
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