The problem is people aren't the only ones writing on that drive. The OS has lots of services that also write to disk. Apps do the same (remember the debacle back when Firefox would write everything you did on the disk, just to be able to diagnose and restore your session?). Sure, they're not designed to kill your SSD, but the thing is, you don't really control how much they write and you don't know when some bug causes them to write more than they should.
I mean, sure, I've been doing this long enough to realize SSDs these days last longer than those HDDs which posed very few concerns wrt their lifetime. Yet somehow I can't rest easy when I read about a shiny new SSD with a few hundred p/e cycles.
When I say people overestimate how much they write to their SSDs, I mean including the OS. OS SSDs don't write nearly as much data as people think. I have a Crucial MX300 that has been my OS drive in my work computer that I use constantly m-f for 4 years now and it only had 25TB written to it. Drives just aren't getting written to nearly as much as people think. The fact is the controller is more likely to die long before the NAND does in a normal use case.
If you need capacity you are likely working with large media files or multi-gigabyte single datasets. These are most likely coming from RAM or NVMe pagefile, or being read/written all from one drive.
Not really, and even if they are multiple-gigabyte the QVO is still faster than an HDD. Lets just say you have a 100GB file for some reason. The QVO is still going to write that file a good 2.5 minutes faster than an HDD(assuming an average write speed of 110MB/s on the HDD). And that, like I said, is a rare scenario. Even if you are say writing a blu-ray rip to the drive, you aren't going to break out of the SLC Cache. There really an actual real world scenario where you'd exhaust the SLC Cache, even if you are dealing with large media files. And if you are, then the QVO should be the final storage place for the processed video, not the storage location of the RAW video. But, like I said, I wouldn't recommend the QVO compared to other SSDs, but it is definitely still faster than a HDD. And not a QLC drives are like the QVO either, so lumping all QLC drives in with the QVO isn't fair. The Intel QLC drives, Crucials P1, and Sabrent Rocket Q all outperform even some TLC drives in average write speed despite being QLC.
If you want a casual user OS and general purpose drive, the 1TB QVO is acceptably quick for bursts of 20GB or less. It's far from the best drive and it's pretty low performance/$ but it won't be an absolute disaster. In this situation I'd definitely pick the miserable QVO over spinning rust.
Try 40GB. And I thought the QVO was slower than a HDD, why would you ever pick it over an HDD?
That's not what this discussion is about though, not even close. It's about streaming very large sequential data to an SSD in the sort of instance where you might buy this Sandisk or spinning rust as secondary storage. 4TB SATA is a terrible choice for primary storage that your OS and applications are using. Someone who can afford 4TB of NAND isn't likely to be using spinning rust for the OS/Application drive. Please use a little common sense and read the context of the discussion.
I am reading the context, even in the context of this thread the QVO is still faster. It's faster even if you are writing 100GB of data at once, which even for a storage drive is pretty rare.
Your exact claim was that HDDs provide "
far" more performance than a QVO. I'd like you to back that up. Show me some numbers that back up the "far" part. Because even writing very large amounts of data the difference definitely doesn't amount to being "far".