@ankonaskiff17 so. ssd technology is write once memory. once that bit is written, it cannot be written again.

Uh, no. The cells that contain the bits do wear out over time, calculated in Total Bytes Written, but they are re-writeable. Writing and rewriting those bits causes wear. And the SSD has some overhead to let you maintain the listed capacity over time. But it is a read/write technology.

There are some write-once SSDs on the market, but you have to specifically purchase them. The few that I found are Windows-only.
How Solid State Drives Work

About a year ago I bought a kit from Raspberry Shake and they wanted to sell me a microSD Card that had their logo on it but amounted to an industrial grade microSD Card. I got curious about the cards because they can be significantly higher priced than a consumer grade card. I came away from that dive down the rabbit hole that they undergo a much more harsh testing/qualification regime than what you would find at your local electronics store.
They are oriented towards industrial applications that might see significant vibration and/or temperature extremes.

This is what I bought and for where I have that earthquake detector it is probably extreme overkill but better safe than sorry.

If you are curious about things Raspberry Pi’s get used for every hexagon on the below picture represents a Pi being used as an earthquake detector.
When the Tonga volcano exploded you could see how tremors traveled, worldwide.

I have 15000 pics I’ve taken, consuming 2 TB of disk space

for me, fewer partitions is better, but on my windows boot I have 18 drive letters…
I have two external drives, one 5tb, one 8tb…

but, all drives die…

Now, I don’t have any expectation that I would get anywhere remotely near the capacity of either style storage device with meaningful data in form of files I want to save so sort of abstract question here.

The below is based on all experience being from Windows 3.1—>Windows 11
ZERO Linux until discovery of MM.
In a dusty corner of my brain I seem to recall something about when a computer is up and running it uses a portion of its storage media to put a running program on. Say you are running a complex Excel spreadsheet, some of that will be in RAM and some will be a chunk of (historically) HDD space. If I’m way screwed up just say “that ain’t how it works” and I’m fine with that.
BUT, if an SSD only writes once to each block of memory, I could see how that could chew up an SSD’s storage capacity over time

Linux doesn’t use drive letters, it’s all one big naming space

/ is the root

and you can mount other partitions into that space anywhere you want.

you use the file /etc/fstab

to configure where to mount volumes

there are graphical tools for creating the partitions. gparted is the one I use most often

if you use gparted to look. at your SD card I think there are 2 partitions

put swap etc on SSD

now there is a tricky way (which I’m doing) which replaces the drive UUID in /etc/fstab

and poof you are running exact same code/ file system layout from ssd.

or nowadays you can USB boot the SSD directly
no SD card involved

so ssd’s have a limit. TxW

total x written

my 2 terabyte M2 SSD has a 3000 TBW, terabytes written limit or 5 years which ever comes first

it’s a combination of size and activity.

now, the bad part. the OS does not know about this limit, and the cards cannot tell the OS there is no more room… so the os happily writes, thinking the data was saved… oops… then things get nutty.

lots of reads are ok.

SD cards are pretty small

booting an sd card, and writing a lot (paging due to low memory, writing lots of logs,… ). will eat up the txb. limit pretty quick… months…

I boot my pi off SD card, but run off a 1 tb ssd drive… it’s faster too. this before USB boot.