used 12 wear levels cycles and with only a single power cycle count and ZERO power-on time, sounds like an unreasonable amount of data copying and benching, what are you doing with it ..
That was not me. I took the SMART data before I wrote anything to the SSD.
It is odd that it is showing an attribute 177 value of 12, but the LBAs written (attribute 241) 497447 x 512B indicate about 255MB of host writes.
So the question is what is attribute 177 counting? I did a full drive sequential write (QD1, 128KiB block size) and attribute 177 increased by 1 while attribute 241 increased by 500118016 x 512B = 256.06GB. So it seems attribute 177 is probably counting average number of erase cycles for the flash (+/- 0.5), and attribute 241 is indeed counting host writes in 512B increments.
So, it looks like Samsung may have done about 255MB of host writes as a burn-in test. But I don't understand the 12 x 256 GB = 3TB of block erases that attribute 177 seems to indicate. No way is the write amplification 12,000. My best guess is that Samsung has a special way to do a lot (about 12) of block erases to the flash without actually writing to the LBAs, and that Samsung does this as a burn-in test and/or to determine the faulty flash cells so that they can be marked bad. Or maybe the flash chips are tested separately before being soldered to the circuit board, and they all get erased 12 times, so Samsung just initializes attribute 177 to 12 on all the SSDs.
I tried a secure erase but attribute 177 did not increment, so that cannot explain it.