What are drive writes per day or DWPD?

Drive writes per day, also known abbreviated as DWPD, is an endurance measurement for solid state drives (SSDs). Typically, it is measured at 100% random writes and over a period of 5 years. While some drives in the past featured a rating of 25 DWPD, more common at least in 2023 is 1 or 3 DWPD. Overall, the endurance rating can be broken down into three buckets, write intensive, read intensive, and mixed use. Write intensive is usually 10 DWPD while mixed use, which means a mix of writes and reads, is 3 DWPD. Read intensive workloads would be 1 DWPD or sometimes less. Manufacturers are moving towards less endurance and trading off instead for higher capacities and thus more compact NAND flash memory. The higher the number of drive writes per day the better, so even if you don't have a write intensive workload, it's still better for the long term as every SSD can only write so much before it can only be read from and writes either get locked or data errors come about.