What Is Write Amplification?
The SSD Guy, March 21st, 2023
For a long time, The SSD Guy has been talking about Write Amplification without explaining what It is. This post is intended to fix that.
Write amplification is an internal issue for NAND flash SSDs that arises from the way that NAND chips work. It doesn't exist in standard HDDs, nor did it exist in DRAM SSDs before we had NAND ones. In a nutshell it's the number of times that a NAND chip within an SSD is written to after the host computer performs a single write.
Since NAND flash wears out after too many writes the higher the write amplification, the shorter the SSD will last. Write amplification also increases the internal write traffic within the SSD, and that slows the SSD down.