Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1u996ru/i_killed_nvme_due_to_too_much_data_written/

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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/non-existing-person on 2026-06-18 15:20:36+00:00.

Someone recently put how he has written petabytes of ghost data and drive still lives. Well, I have written petabyte of real data which killed my disk xd

I had a non important cron job on my openbsd, which started segfaulting on one point due to some change in system. And, as it turned out OpenBSD had core dumps enabled by default. So it happily created 4GB or so of core dump every minute, to a nvme drive. One day I started noticing weird things, reboots, errors, some binaries were working, some were segfaulting. And as you know by know, I killed the drive.

It was samsung 960 evo 250GB, before failing it managed to write 979 TB. According to datasheet warranty was up to 100TB data written. So it's like cat, it had 9 lives :D Smart shows "Percentage Used: 164%". I don't know whether that's a bug or unsigned char overflow XD

But yeah... that was a good drive, lived through hell, and survived long enough to tell the tale.

BTW, to this day I blame OpenBSD a little bit for killing my drive by enabling core dumps by default. Yes, I had backups. Yes, they did work :D

Here is a smart log if you're interested: https://termsend.pl/o/p63hx