Steam game installation procedure reducing SSD lifespan?

[MΛǤƗƆ _Ϯ_ BǢǙMLɪИǦ]

Hi,
I'm certain everyone is familiar with the good old "reserving disc space" window occuring right before every steam download and game installation. I always thought steam allocated disc memory using some OS procedure in this time. Monitoring disc performance during the process rather points towards steam creating some sort of dummy file the same size of the game to reserve space. The drive writes an equal amount of data before the game is even downloaded and the actual files are created.

Do I miss something or does this mean lifetime of SSDs used for steam games primarily is halved? Modern NAND flash drives have a defined lifespan that referres to write-cycles per cell, don't they? Is steam maybe just rewiriting existing cell charges inside the dummyfile? The lifecycle probably referres to the cell actually being switched to the opposite state? I'm not too familiar with the details of this, so maybe someone with better knowledge could help out. Maybe someone could even explain to me why steam what it does exactly. I'm pretty confident the techgurus responsible for this know what they are doing. Or is it maybe just a plausabiltyissue, because nobody downloads all his games weekly? Would it help my drive to life longer when I install games on an HDD from now on an migrate them afterwards?

I'm curious, thank's already!

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/135507548123771264/

[humboldt]

if i got it:
ssd can last forever. statistically it is possible that ssd's can get broke if they get older, but they are just made of transistors: a transistor can last forever.
second: steam needs space for the game you want to install and takes away the space before it installs the game...no problem.
third: a ssd is faster. you can surely use it for steam games and have fun.
kind regards

[Omega]

Your SSD will still outlive any HDD by at least a decade. There is no need to babysit SSDs..

People need to stop worrying about terrabytes writen..

[rotNdude]

It just allocates the space but doesn't write anything until the files are downloaded and uncompressed.