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Solve : Maximize life of your SSD? |
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Answer» http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-maximize-the-life-of-your-ssd Sharing this link that I found helpful. I have 4 SSD's and in 3 of the 4 computers with SSD's I am going to make adjustments tonight when I get out of work. Corrections I need to make: - Move Swap Space pointer back to the HDD's on 2 of my systems. ( * I didnt think it would hurt the SSD's to use their speed for swap space, but the issue is as quoted here which adds "lots" of unnecessary wear. More wear than I realized when I first set them up for their speed advantage over regular HDD's. ) Quote The problem with an SSD is [that] data is written in blocks. A block may be 256KB: 256 * 1000 * 8 binary digits. To change even ONE of these digits, you must rewrite the ENTIRE block. That is to say, your OS sees 1 bit being written, but the SSD wear is equivalent to 256KB being written: a 2.048 MILLION fold difference. - Disable the Page File on my new Windows 7 64-bit system which has 8GB RAM vs having it active on my SSD. ( Just as this article states if you are using 2 or 3 GB of RAM, but not the full 8GB, it might as well be disabled. My new build with games never use over 4GB of RAM yet, so I might as well get rid of the virtual memory which is slower than system RAM and not necessary with this build. ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On my netbook that is running Windows XP with a 60GB SSD on 1GB RAM with a 1.66Ghz Atom CPU, if I had more RAM, I could try to get by without the swap space, but it would likely pose a serious performance hit to this computer if removed without a memory upgrade. With just 1GB RAM, it runs with around 250mb free memory with page/swap enabled, but if I choke off the swap space to preserve the life of the SSD, it may run out of memory with just 1GB of DDR2. * Maybe the fix here is to install a 2GB memory stick which should be plenty of memory for a netbook running XP Home SP3, and then disable this page file. http://www.crucial.com/upgrade/Toshiba-memory/NB+Series/NB205-upgrades.html I am going to check to see if these drives have TRIM and if its enabled as well. I am pretty sure the 2 larger drives have it, but the 2 smaller ones that I bought cheap as refurbs are questionable. SSD Drives are: 90GB OCZ Vertex 3 ( In Win 7 64 bit Gaming system as slave ) 60GB OCZ Agility 3 ( In Win XP Home Netbook, only drive ) 40GB Corsair ($35 refurb drive deal ) ( In Win 7 32 bit Gaming system as a slave ) 30GB OCZ ($30 refurb drive deal ) ( In Win 7 32 bit wife's system for gaming as slave ) They work sweet for fast load times of large games like World of Warcrafts 22GB of bloat. However I know that I am taking a chance on the refurbs I bought as for its like buying 2 used cars at a car dealer with no odometers to know how much wear they have on them. But the price was right for the name brand, so hopefully they will last! My thoughts buying these cheap were that they may have been purchased and returned without any issues mainly because the original customers realized they needed larger capacity than 30 or 40GB. And being recertified as good they would have to relabel and sell them as refurbs maybe... or at least that is my wishfull thinking on the wear on them. Swap space/page file is ideally suited to being on an SSD, moving it back to a mechanical drive is counterproductive. The write amplification you mention when referring to block writes is a worst case scenario, and not as much of a problem as most make out. Good SSDs are rated for a lot more write cycles than the average, or even power user, would use before replacing the drive anyway. If I remember rightly, the venerable Intel X25-M was rated for 10GB of writes per day for 10 years. There's a very INTERESTING thread on Xtremesystems where users have just written data constantly to a variety of SSDs to test their longevity, makes for interesting reading. Also, controller failures are much more likely than a flash failure - not that all SSD controllers are unreliable, some are fantastically reliable and others less so, but a controller failure can happen with no warning and will very rarely be caused by writing too much to the drive, so reducing the writes doesn't necessarily improve the lifespan or reliability of the drive. There's really no need to do any "tweaks" for systems running on SSDs in my opinion - modern drives have TRIM and decent garbage collection which works fine if TRIM doesn't work for some reason, they're rated to take more writes than you'd ever use in the real world, and there's far too much FUD spread around - disappointed to see Lifehacker running this. Their advice is basically - turn off the page file or move it (pointless as mentioned above) disable hibernation (because an SSD makes using it pointless, more than that hibernation will cause damage) move temporary files (also counterproductive) disable search indexing and superfetch (pointless on an SSD but again won't cause damage) and disable defrag (done by default if you run the WEI and the system detects an SSD, because defragging an SSD is pointless). All I do when I set up a system with an SSD is update the firmware of the drive, install the latest SATA drivers, and run the WEI afterwards.I'd have to agree with Calum, I've always just installed the OS on any SSDs and used them without making any other changes and I've never had an SSD go bad (I have them in almost all my MACHINES). I have also heard a lot of bad information about what damages an SSD spread around, my favorite being that running programs or storing files on your SSD is bad and the SSD should only ever store the OS! *facepalm* - Tell that to my SSD-only laptop! Quote I have also heard a lot of bad information about what damages an SSD spread around, my favorite being that running programs or storing files on your SSD is bad and the SSD should only ever store the OS! *facepalm* - Tell that to my SSD-only laptop! Thanks for input on this. I was sort of thinking the same thing about, what about systems that are strictly just running off of SSD's like my netbook that have no good solution to avoid swap space usage on them. Looking at more info online, while I have always found Lifehacker as a source of correct info unless a typo here or there, I am now noticing that the info may have been over-protective of unnecessary wear to SSD's with comments here as well as other google sources. I didn't get around to making any changes last night to any systems like I planned. And will leave them be with the swap space on the SSDs as I have already configured. I did find a piece of software though that was helpful in looking at Drive Stats, Health, and Features called CrystalDiskInfo and its free and works well. And it answered questions about the unknown usage odometer of my SSD's that I bought as refurbs. The info read off the drives controllers were loaded with info such as how many power cycles, hours of operation, temps, total data read/write for SSD's over their lifetime to date, features the drives have such as if the SSDs have TRIM etc, and fortunately all 4 of them have TRIM, as well as it brought to my attention that a health of my new gaming computer build 500GB SATA HDD ( that I carefully extracted out of an old Seagate External ) has 1 reallocated sector which it warned me about. While this is not a major issue since all drives have some space to use when sectors are flagged as bad, this stood out running this software and it warned me in orange vs everything else in green. Also I found out that the 500GB HDD that I installed in my new build only has 8MB Cache and 1700 hours of use, when my prior older gaming systems hard drive is a 500GB SATA with 16MB Cache and over 12,000 hours of use. My SSDs that I bought as refurbs unless they were cleared at the factory of their prior stats they all have less than 1000 hours on each of them, which I can see that many hours being on them of my use. The newest one the 40GB that I got 2 weeks ago only has 84 hours on it which 60 of those hours are probably before I received it as for my new system hasnt been on more than maybe 24 hrs combined with building it, updates, and some gaming. The SSD on my older gaming system with this software showed that this drive which is about 18 months old had already handled 10TB of Reads and 3TB of Writes. A statistic that I didnt think a drive would safe. http://crystalmark.info/software/index-e.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also found this info here from DELL concerning their SSD's, which should be about the same for others: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/solid-state-drive-FAQ.pdf In which one thing that I found rather interesting was this statement in this PDF: Quote 5. Why I might notice a decrease in write performance when I compare a used drive to a new drive?SSD drives are intended for use in environments that perform a majority of reads vs. writes. In order for drives to live up to a specific warranty period, MLC drives will often have an endurance management mechanism built into the drives. If the drive projects that the useful life is going to fall short of its warranty, the drive will use a throttling mechanism to slow down the speed of the writes. And there are 2 things here that I picked up on... #1 Quote SSD drives are intended for use in environments that perform a majority of reads vs. writes.This might be why lifehacker was suggesting to avoid swap/virtual memory on SSD's, however HDD's are going to phase out as a thing of the past as soon as the price decreases and capacity increases to a certain capacity around 512GB - 1TB for the average computer user. #2 Funny and yet interesting that a drive that is driven hard for read/writes will slow down to fail outside of the Warranty Terms! * This kind of statement is one that I was tripped up in reading from DELL. Stating as a FACT that their SSD's under the right conditions of EXCESSIVE wear, a throttling feature enables in stretching the life of a product by slowing down its use ... in order to buy time .... To FAIL Outside of Warranty Terms? WOW!!!! Will be looking into the info on my drives for Wear Leveling. Their statement of 100GB usable in their SSD drive example and 28GB hidden to me seems very generous for replacement of dead cells. And I thought that SSD's shrink when the cells die or maybe this is after all the hidden capacity was used up and no spare cells to go around as in the below quote from the same DELL source. Quote 12. What steps do SSD drives take to limit the likelihood of damaging cells due to excessive writes?Dell uses following methods to avoid damaging flash cells and extend the life of the SSD drive:Crystaldiskinfo is a useful tool, yes, - CrystalDiskMark is also a handy benchmark. On Sandforce based drives (OCZ LE, Vertex 2, Vertex 3, Agility 2, Agility 3, most Corsair Force drives, Sandisk drives, Intel 520, Intel 330, and others) it won't give an accurate RESULT as by default it uses a mixture of compressible and incompressible data. Sandforce drives rely on being able to compress data to get their headline figures, so they recommend the ATTO benchmark instead. Of course, for a real-world comparison, CrystalDiskMark is fine, as not all data is compressible and thus Sandforce drives are not as fast as the numbers suggest. You're correct that Lifehacker is usually a reliable source of info, hence why I'm disappointed they have posted this article which contains some pretty useless information along with some common sense tweaks. The throttling you mention is a "feature" of Sandforce based drives. This doesn't appear on many, if any, drives based on other controllers, but Sandforce drives will slow down the write speed once a certain threshold is passed within a timeframe. 28GB overprovisioning on a 100GB drive is not always the case, it's just an example. Some drives have more than others. It's also possible to set aside a little extra by partitioning the drive and leaving an area entirely unpartitioned - this will then be used for further wear levelling. Not really useful with modern drives except under certain rare circumstances, but possible if you're really paranoid about writing to your drive. Not all SSDs have a buffer to help collect writes together, helping to eliminate write amplification. Some use other tricks for this. It's also possible to do this in software - there's a program called FancyCache I've used before which can use your system RAM as a read/write buffer. It's highly configurable and can also use a drive as a cache for another drive - effectively, a more advanced version of Intel's SRT. This can be handy when you have a drive that's not so great at random I/O (HDD or an old SSD) as it will hold the data in RAM and flush it periodically, turning a series of random 1KB writes into a 1MB sequential write. It's worth taking a look at it as once you get it set up properly it provides quite a speed boost. A full RAMdrive would be faster than FancyCache for, say, loading a game, but a RAMdrive is a more specific tool and thus is better at what it does, but it's not as much of an all rounder, if that makes sense. I used to play Battlefield out of a RAM drive with 5GB/sec read speeds - that destroys any SSD out there.Quote A full RAMdrive would be faster than FancyCache for, say, loading a game, but a RAMdrive is a more specific tool and thus is better at what it does, but it's not as much of an all rounder, if that makes sense. I used to play Battlefield out of a RAM drive with 5GB/sec read speeds - that destroys any SSD out there I have used RAMdrive's before, but my problem is that the games I want to speed up exceed the amount of system RAM as for I cant afford a system with 32GB RAM to use 25GB of it for large MMORPG games. I have used this RAMdisk before and it is REALLY FAST!!! I ran a benchmark on it and it was just insanely fast compared to a HDD as well as SSD having direct access of data from RAM. http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk I actually found this worked really well with a SQL Database that was being populated with data through an automation program I created, it was hammering my hard drive to where the hard drive LED was lit solid as every piece of info was being written to the tables of the database which was causing a write to the drive. I ended up placing this onto a RAMdrive and it KEPT the abuse of the read/writes off of the hard drive and allowed for a final write of the data to the drive in the end. Did this on a system with 3GB HDD and a 1GB RAMdisk.Exactly, there are tons of uses for RAMdisks. Redirect your temp files to it...run a database off it...load a game, or parts of a game, into it...a program named Steam Mover assists greatly by automating the process of moving the files and creating a junction link for them so that the OS and programs don't think the files have moved, this eliminates problems with not being able to find vital files. The largest game I ever played from a RAMdisk was Battlefield BC2, which was around 12GB in size if I remember rightly. When RAM was really cheap, I liked to go overboard on it - now, prices are back up, so I agree it's prohibitively expensive for most people.re: RAM I think it's a trade-off, especially with newr Operating Systems that have features like SuperFetch and the ureadahead daemon (Linux). I notice a huge difference when starting games if the OS "expects" me to start the game; for example, if I play SkyRim after not having played it for a few weeks, it will take noticably longer to load. If I play it frequently, Windows get's the idea and starts to precache parts of the game even when I'm doing something else; the result is that the game starts noticably faster, even if the System has been rebooted since, on account of Windows having that data as part of the stuff it precaches. The more available RAM, the more precaching SuperFetch can do so the more applications and data files are streamlined. I think SuperFetch and the OS caching for Files comes into play for an SSD, too; in particular caching could take place that would streamline multiple write operations into one, meaning that what would be any number of block writes would become one block write. This is/was designed of course for slower magnetic hard drives, but SSDs will gain the benefits as well.Again, SuperFetch, Prefetch, and similar things are halfway houses. FancyCache is like a more advanced, configurable version of SuperFetch, but a RAMdrive far outshines any of those for raw performance, sacrificing flexibility and ease of use. That's not to say they don't work well, they're great at what they're designed for, and certainly offer huge speed boosts over systems not running with SuperFetch or equivalent. I don't think SuperFetch streamlines writes to prevent write amplification, although I can't say for sure - you may well be correct on that.Quote from: Calum on June 15, 2013, 01:37:52 AM I don't think SuperFetch streamlines writes to prevent write amplification, although I can't say for sure - you may well be correct on that. It doesn't, The basic Disk I/O Drivers do that. Unless of course Write Caching is disabled.Thanks for all useful info. Never heard of Steam Mover, so going to look that up now to familiarize myself with that.Quote from: BC_Programmer on June 15, 2013, 11:15:39 AM It doesn't, The basic Disk I/O Drivers do that. Unless of course Write Caching is disabled. I misunderstood, sorry, you're quite right. |
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