Hello,
I'm not certain this is a problem for me but I was hoping someone out there would know. I have an Intel gen 2 SSD that my operating system is installed on along with an overclocked i7 and the rest of the goodies. I was wondering if I may be impacting the life of my SSD to an extent that is unwise and unwarranted since I believe Einstein@Home to be writing to it all the time. I run the system 24/7 with Einstein running the whole time. In relation to the Windows 7 operating system, could Einstein@Home be using a significant percentage of the writes if not much else is being done on the system a lot of the time? If so, what would be the easiest way to move the whole thing to another drive without messing stuff up? I apologize if this topic has already been covered somewhere else.
Thank you for any help,
Dana
Copyright © 2024 Einstein@Home. All rights reserved.
Einstein on SSD's
)
Current generation consumer SSDs are good for 10k writes and the firmware is able to spread them out evenly. If you wrote 20GB/day, your SSD should last 4000days, or about 12 years. Under normal circumstances a typical user doesn't even hit 1GB/day. Short of thrashing your swap file to death there's nothing to worry about.
Even then, there are a few sites that have tested SSDs by constantly writing to them. Because of the way SSDs fail (each flash cell slowly but steadily increases in the amount of time it takes to write) the controller is able to ID failing cells and take them out of use before they go bad. At the offical 10k writes point the drives still had 90% usable capacity.
Realistically the only way to write a consumer SSD to death is to run a write intensive database off of it, and that's why server class SSDs use a higher grade flash that has only half as much capacity per chip but is good for 100k writes.
Hello, Thank you for your
)
Hello,
Thank you for your informative reply. It made me wonder if, to an equal extent, it is the number of writes that will degrade an SSD. What I have been doing is leaving a small (512Mb) swap file on the SSD and made a large (6GB to equal amount of RAM) swap file on a different drive. That was the best solution I could come up with which I thought would limit writes to the SSD swap file.
I did not understand your math very well to arrive at the 12 year figure. Is that 10,000 write figute you quoted per day, per year or lifetime? Could you help me understand that part a little better?
Thank you again,
Dana
RE: Hello, Thank you for
)
Lifetime. Which means a 80GB SSD is good for 800,000GB of data writing.
[pre]
800,000GB of writes 1 day 1 year 4000 years
------------------ * ----------- * -------- = ---------- =
1 SDD lifetime 20GB writes 365 days 365 SSD lifetime
[/pre]
== 10.95 years to wear out the SSD, or that my mental math in the prior post was off by about 9% because I made a stupid mistake.
EDIT: fixed formatting
Conversely, 10,000 writes
)
Conversely, 10,000 writes divided by 100 writes per day = 100 days. Perhaps I'm confused about what the definition of a "write" is.
A write is not defined as
)
A write is not defined as changing the harddrive as a whole. It is changing a small part of it, say: a single byte. I don't know the actual definition. It could be less; a bit. Or it coukd be more; a group of bytes. I don't know what constitutes a single unit on a SSD.
I have also the 80GB G2 Intel
)
I have also the 80GB G2 Intel SSDs on my computers for 1/2 a year now. So far no problems. But I have changed BOINC to write only every 5 minutes to the disk instead of every minute.
In my opinion there are major problems that arise.
First the SSD got 80GB (74GB real useable) but after the installation of the OS and some programs there are only 30 GB left. So 11 years become more like 4 years.
Second thing: What truly kills a SSD are the random writes. I think for the 80GB models that is 3.5TB. If you use a tool to benchmark the random writes, you can kill the SSD in under a day (because the random writes are so high 50MB/s).
So after scaring everybody: The SSD needs unused space to compensate the broken blocks. It doesn´t use the free space in a partition but the space, which is unpartitioned. So to enhance your drives lifespan, you have to fully erease your SSD and instead of building a 74 GB partition you create a 65GB partition. So the spare space is doubled and so the lifespan (for typical usage). If you know, that you don´t need the full space on the drive and don´t partition the full disk. (This adds to the costs of a SSD).
The good thing about SSDs is, even if you can´t write to the disk anymore, you can still read the data.
For me I don´t care about this problem. If the disk holds for 2 years in my work pc it is ok, because then there will be much faster (SATA 3 drives) on the market for the same price.
And I would never go back to mechanical disk for the OS drive.
good source for SSDs: anandtech.com->storage and http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
OT: @ Dana: What is the speed of your Core i7? We are fighting for the 1st place of the fastest single socket system and I just want to know;)
RE: What I have been doing
)
The swap file should only -ever- be used if you run out of RAM. If that happens - let's face it - you're likely to need a lot more than 512MiB to help out whatever application is using up so much RAM. It is, however, a good idea to look up how to stop Windows (if that's what you're using) from using the swap file for system services - this will make your system more responsive, and stop it needlessly causing I/O activity.
Hello Hotzee33, I was
)
Hello Hotzee33,
I was very much hoping to run in to you at some point. I know this violates rules of changing the thread but I must since I can't figure out how to send you a message. I was looking at the stats for the top Einstein RAC systems (http://www.statsnstones.com/Hosts.aspx?sort=1&projid=12&page=0) and found you near the top in the number 4 overall spot. These rankings change quite often but at this particular moment I'm only a couple spots behind you with my (air cooled) OC'd i7. Somehow you are in the top five overall with a Q6600. I have a 3.48Mhz (low end liquid cooled) Q6600 and manage around a 3600 RAC compared to your 6700 RAC . I guess I won't ask you for all your secrets but I'm quite impressed and bewildered at the same time that I can't catch you with my i7 that has the second overall RAC of all i7's. If you are at all feeling like sharing system building and OC experiences with each other please send me a PM (I can't figure out how to send you a message). And thank you very much for your helpful, as well as the others, input regarding the SSD situation. I will read the article you posted today. Since we have the exact same model I'd like to share SSD experiences too.
I again apologize for inserting this post. Hope I can be forgiven, or told a better way to accomplish the same goal,
Dana
P.S. the straight, honest answer is that my i7 is overclocked to exactly 3.923 GHz as measured by cpuz (19x206.5). But like I suggested, we really need to get together.
RE: A write is not defined
)
It's 10,000 writes for each cell of flash memory. In typical current SSD's the smallest chunk of disk space that can be written at a time is 4kb, and the smallest chuck that can be erased (neccesary prior to a write) is around 512k.
RE: In my opinion there
)