This applies to all kinds of flash memories: SSDs, USB flash drives, SD memory cards, etc.
I hope it answers once and for all the question of how long your flash memory will last. I'm not aware of anyone in this forum reporting they wore out a flash memory. Another thing to consider is that a flash memory cell's wear-out mechanism means that it will gradually begin to give read errors, but since error-correcting bits are added, there is plenty of warning of impending failure due to the wear-out mechansim. Unlike spinning hard disks, which in my experience often fail catastrophically with little or no warning.
by Dong Ngo April 15, 2017
...be aware that the number of potential P/E cycles for an SSD is exponentially larger than that of a sheet of paper. In addition, modern SSDs have technologies that increase write efficiency and reduce wear on its storage cells. Among these technologies, the most important is the "wear-leveling" algorithms that effectively make sure all the drive's memory chips are used up, cell by cell, before the first cell can be written to again. This also means that SSDs of larger capacities generally have longer life spans than do smaller ones.
So how long is long? To help users estimate how long an SSD will last, most SSD manufacturers present the drive's endurance by the amount of data that can be written to the drive. For example, the 750GB Crucial MX300 has an endurance of 220TBW, meaning you can write 220 terabytes of data to the drive before it becomes unreliable. To put this in perspective, if you write 50GB of data per day every day to the drive, it will take you some 12 years to wear it out. Most other SSDs have similar or better endurance ratings. Generally the larger the drive, the higher he endurance.
Most of us actually write just a fraction of 50GB of data -- which is about two Blu-ray discs' worth -- on our computer's host drive on a daily basis, and many days we don't write anything at all. Note that watching movies, reading PDF files, or viewing photos doesn't count as writing; that's reading, which has no effect on an SSD's life expectancy. Only activities like copying music from another drive, downloading files, editing files, or backing up your phone, and so on require you to write to the drive.
That said, if you use an SSD the way you would a hard drive, chances are it will still last longer than a regular hard drive would. But you can do more...