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    +1, but the idea that a regular user can hit the wear limit of an SSD is becoming outdated. See this article. Those 250 gb SSDs were still trucking at 1 petabyte written (4000x the drive's capacity). Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 16:20
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    This is a good point, however if files were securely deleted every time (involving 1 or more writes over the entire location), then there is at least a higher chance of hard drive failure. Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 16:22
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    I got machine with 256GB SSD OS-Drive in 2013 and a year later it was showing S.M.A.R.T. warnings that it was going to die. Got a replacement, and a year later, new SMART warnings about 3% remaining drive lifteime and I got another replacement. Maybe my behavior to keep the SSD at 95% capacity, and keeping 20+GB of programs in RAM every day, and running on always-on web server, and fighting tooth-and-nail against my corporate file-sync software crashing while it failed to sync thousands of files were contributors... It's not impossible to hit the wear limit of modern SSDs. Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 20:14
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    @CarlWalsh no, the OS doesn't need to zero anything before creating a new file. Each block of the new file can be (and will be) simply written over some currently unused block, no matter if it is "fresh" or if it was previously a part of some other file. Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 20:29
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    @CarlWalsh No; The OS and/or filesystem with copy-on-write only need to give the illusion that a freshly-allocated block has a given value. Much like calloc() doesn't actually need to allocate and wipe memory until such time as it is actually used, a filesystem could pretend the contents are zero until you make a write to it. Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 21:00