Background: I am considering buying a new disk (and will write an email later with some other questions or observations about the process), but I know that, at least often for SSD drives, they now specify what I will call the longevity in terms of TB TBW (iiuc, that is terabytes total bytes written).
Anyway, I edit large files many times a day and try to save it at each edit or partial edit (at a guess, one particular file is around 100 MB, and I may save it 200 or more times a day). There are two things I'd like to measure, and I'm wondering what tools (or approaches) are available: 1. I'd like to count how many times a day I actually save the file. (One approach (at least I think I could do this) could be to write a sort of shell script wrapper and always initiate saves using the shell script, but I was hoping there was more of pre-built solution.) 2. A lot of my editing involves editing near (but not at) the end of a file. I assume (I know) that the software that saves the file is smart enough not to rewrite the entire file but instead to preserve the beginning of the file and just rewrite the changed part of the file (or from there to the end of the file). Can anyone confirm that, and, if so, suggest any way of measuring how much is written to a given file in a given time period (e.g., per day)? I guess at a very deep level (I mean like at the level of the disk firmware or driver level), this may differ between an SSD and an HDD -- if you have any insight into that, I'd appreciate that. Thanks!
