Question PCIe SSD "Percentage Used" Increasing Too Quickly

Apr 18, 2019
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I purchased a new DELL XPS 8930 on March 15, 2019.

This unit came with a 256 GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD as a boot drive.
Unit is running Windows 10 Home (version 1803).

Windows System Information only lists the following information:
The manufacturer is listed as: (Standard disk drives)
The model is listed as: PCIe SSD

Application use is for word processing and Internet usage.

I am alarmed about the S.M.A.R.T. Attribute for "Percentage Used" on the PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD. After only 5 weeks of use, the S.M.A.R.T. Attribute for "Percentage Used" is 5%. The "Percentage Used" figure increases about 1% every 6 days. This means that I will get no more than 20 months before it reaches 100% used status. Why is this happening?

The "Percentage Used" figure does not seem to match the the figures for the "Data Units Written" by the S.M.A.R.T. parameters {TBW = [[Data Units Written * 512000 b for each Data Unit] / [1.024^4]]/[1 E+12]}.

The Daily Writes to the SSD are about 15 GB/Day. On a typical SSD, that should give me at least 10 years before I reach a typical TBW limit of about 70 TBW for a drive of this capacity.

Please help me with both of these questions:
How do I find out the TBW limit for the SSD on this unit?
Why is the "Percentage Used" parameter for the SSD increasing so quickly?
 
Apr 18, 2019
2
0
10
Out of the box, the unit came with indexing enabled, large pagefile (swapfile) size, and SuperFetch enabled. I was also using multiple user logins on this unit. All of that together caused 160 GB/Day of writes to the drive. After disabling indexing, limiting pagefile size, disabling SuperFetch, and going to one user account, I am now down to under 16 GB/Day of writes to the drive, which should give me years of use. Still, the "Percentage Used" S.M.A.R.T. parameter is increasing at an alarming rate, and it doesn't seem to correlate to the current daily writes to the SSD.
I was quite surprised and quite disappointed that the unit came with settings that would allow it to die early.