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My question is mainly around the use of Steam on a SSD. I have a 1 TB SSD that I use for gaming with Steam. I've noticed while making a backup using Allway Sync, that Steam creates LOTS of files - several thousand. Will this impact the SSD over time compared to a spinner?

I use nothing but SSDs now for Steam games. So do a lot of people. I have no worries about it. Steam does create some small files when you run a game which is probably related to usage tracking, sync, and update logs, but it's nothing to be concerned about.

Windows probably writes a lot more to the boot SSD than Steam does (a good reason to disable hibernation as I do - that's a massive amount of data written to the drive every time it hibernates).

I currenty use an NVMe but used an SSD before that. I never had any issues. I keep my pictures, videos, and music on two 4tb spinners that get daily backups via crash plan.

I could never go back to HD loading times for gaming. I've been meaning to upgrade my ps4 with an ssd but haven't gotten around to it.

My boot drive is a 256GB M.2 drive for C:
The D: drive is a 1TB SSD for current games that I'm playing regularly.
The E: is a 6TB 7200rpm traditional HDD for other games I don't play as often.

Works for me.

OK thanks for the replies. I was concerned with all the writes to the drive if using Steam. If you use Allway Sync, you'll noticed LOTS and I mean LOTS of files are new/replaced/rewritten during the backup.

I use Allway Sync on my game drive, so the backup drive remains active if my gaming drive craps out. I simply put it in to replace the dead drive, and it's ready to go.

https://allwaysync.com/

My desktop is completely disk less. A hard drive will never see the inside of my computer ever again. 2x M.2 NVMe for my OS, 1x M.2 NVMe for work data, 1x 2TB SSD for weekly images, and 1x 1TB for games. Most are 1-2 years old. My drives rarely outlast me upgrading. Mind you I use the pricier drives (Samsung Pros) which are typically about double the price, but I'm a software/database consultant so I need the performance and reliability. My cheapest drive is the 2TB drive that I use for drive images. That's a Crucial MX500, which is a very good drive for the price. I bought that due to what it was being used for and I needed a large amount of storage. There's lots of articles that go over SSDs and their lifetimes. Chances are you'll never hit their limits, you'll be upgrading them before they die. Just have to stay away from the really cheap crap.

Yeah I am full SSD as well locally, and my game drives are like a older 840pro and some cheap Sandisk SSD I picked up on sale somewhere, and no p0roblems so far. Only issue is the 256GB size is starting to feel small, so will likely swap a couple out for 1TB drives whenever I upgrade the CPU