Does SSD degrade if I regularly turn WSL and Virtual Machine Platform off and on?

Question

For my work, I need to use Docker Desktop while on my free time I use VMWare to run some Guest OS. The performance of any virtual machines run using VMWare is slow when WSL2 + Virtual Machine Platform is enabled -- so I regularly turn them off to get good performance on VMWare. But I need to turn them on to make Docker Desktop work. Because of this, I turn these Windows Features (namely WSL2 and Virtual Machine Platform) off and on daily.

Turning them off and on itself is not much problem for me because it does not take more than 1-2 minutes. But I am worried about the life of my SSD. Does toggling these features write huge amount of data into SSD every time, causing the SSD to deteriorate over time? Or does it write very small amount of data -- making it a pretty harmless thing to do? If you don't know the answer, is there any tool that I can use to see how much writing is actually done on the SSD?

Answer 1

Does toggling these features write huge amount of data into SSD every time, causing the SSD to deteriorate over time?

NO.

A decent SSD can withstand this activity with no issue.

Make sure TRIM is enabled. It is enabled by default, but check. Admin Tools, Optimize drives.

I have VMware running, Host plus 3 machines.

Windows 10 Host, Samsung 1 TB NVMe drive. 600 TBW lifetime write.

After 4.5 years, I am up all the way to 40 TBW . The SSD drive will last longer than the computer.

Good quality SSD drives are engineered to be well used. No issue with what you are doing.

Answer 2

I share the same opinion, any decent SSD can withstand huge amount of writes without any deterioration at all. I use CrystalDiskInfo x64 to give me information on the amount of writes. It gives me the same number of writes, as another program which I have used all my life - HDSentinel, because it also shows the temperature of disks in the SystemTray. The difference between the two displayed numbers is just because 1 TB is actually 1024 GB.