TBW in a RAID5 vSphere Datastore

As I needed to update the SSD firmware on all my disks during my homelab revamp I also read the TBW values from my Samsung EVO 870 4TB SSDs which I was using in a RAID 5 configuration as a vSphere datastore.

The SSDs SMART values showed:

• 6550h power-on time
• 40 TBW

This drills down to roughly 150 GB written per day per device. As this was a RAID5 configuration consisting of 5 disks, this means the every-day payload written was 4x150GB = 600GB.

Thus for a 5 year usage period for my payload I’d need about a Petabyte TBW if I’d use a single SSD or only ~275 TeraByte TBW for single drive in the RAID 5 config with 5 drives.

These values of course only count for my case. Your mileage may vary. Though with this setup I ran my labs, backups within my labs and even some production backups on the SSD storage.