High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Write amplification (WA) is an undesirable phenomenon associated with Flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). Because Flash memory must be erased before it can be rewritten, the process to perform these operations results in moving (or rewriting) user data and metadata more than once. This multiplying effect increases the number of writes required over the life of the SSD which shortens the time it can reliably operate. The increased writes also consume bandwidth to the Flash memory which mainly reduces random write performance to the SSD. Many factors will affect the write amplification of an SSD; some can be controlled by the user and some are a direct result of the data written to and usage of the SSD.