Comment by jasonwatkinspdx

Yes. And the Flash Translation Layer inside modern drives are quite sophisticated. This means you could start out with a write pattern that's causing a lot of copying and reorganization of pages in the back ground, typically because it's doing a lot of unaligned random writes smaller than the erase block size, and initially the performance will be fine. But as the drive wears in, and the capacity fills up, the FTL has less extra space to work with, forcing this garbage collection activity to become increasingly common. So you get performance degradation and premature wearing of the drive in a way that's opaque.