Some tools such as Live Optics display a “daily writes” or “average writes per day” metric and position it as useful for choosing SSD types or estimating backup sizes. This originates from early SSD industry concerns, when manufacturers worried that heavy random-write workloads might wear out NAND cells. These values were later reused for backup sizing, even though they were never designed to measure actual data change.
The key issue is that daily writes are not a change rate. They count every write IO, including repeated overwrites of the same blocks. A system can generate large write volumes while producing almost no new incremental data. Overwrites inflate the number but do not create new data to protect, size for, or store.
Modern SSDs include wear-levelling, garbage collection and large capacities, and NAND wear-out events are extremely rare. Because cumulative write behaviour no longer drives SSD selection or backup sizing, the metric has little practical value today.
For these reasons, OneIQ does not display a “daily change rate” derived from write IO. It focuses on performance, capacity and workload characteristics that reflect real changes in the environment rather than inflated overwrite activity.