Einstein on SSD's

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: since I can't figure

Message 97381 in response to message 97378

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since I can't figure out how to send you a message.


Is the 'Send message' button visible for you under his name ( or generally, the avatar/picture ) ?

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Hope I can be forgiven


That's cool .... what we really don't like is impolite or worse, so you're Okey Dokey in spade fulls there. :-) :-)

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or told a better way to accomplish the same goal


Anyone is always welcome to fire up a new thread. It's the 'New thread' button just above the listing of posts on the left hand side. If you want to hint a linkage with another discussion then :

- suggest that in the thread title ( if you start a thread you get to name it ! ). Roughly something of the form 'new topic ( was : old topic )' say like this one.

- just copy the contents of the post ( or part thereof ) you're responding to into the first post of the thread you're starting. To create a quotation 'manually' just wrap with the BBCode quote tags. For more on BBCode see the little link 'Use BBCode tags to format your text' on the upper right of the Author column/box when you construct your reply.

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

DanNeely
DanNeely
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RE: [pre] 800,000GB of

Message 97382 in response to message 97373

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[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.

I dropped a zero when I did my math, it should be 40,000/365 = 109.5 years to kill the drive.

Dana
Dana
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RE: The swap file should

Message 97383 in response to message 97377

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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 Ver Greeneyes,

I left a small swap file on the opsys drive because Windows complains if I do not. Plus, if I ever did not have access to the other drive with the large swap file on it, I would at least have something that may keep my system from crashing. I admit I have nothing to back this up with except my own uneducated guess. I agree with you that I need a heck of a lot more than a 512 swap file and that's why I created a much larger one on a different drive. I would be very interested in an exact suggestion as how to configure for the best size of the two swap files (if two are even needed). Just a note. The large swap file is on a 5x1Tb (Samsung F1 HD103UJ) RAID0 configuration but I have other single drives available for the swap file task If I had to.

Are you telling me that I should completely disable the swap file on the SSD? I left the small one on there for some small amount of redundancy (and so Window wouldn't complain) in the system. Plus, a swap file on a RAID 0 configuration of that type and size on the motherboard controller isn't exactly professional grade and that is more disks than I have managed at once in a RAID 0 configuration thus far (and plans to add one more TB to the RAID). But I do have data backups on another system via Ethernet.

I did not completely understand your last suggestion on how to stop Window from using the swap file for system services. I think I need a much more of a nuts and bolts explanation on how to accomplish such a task (check that, I'm sure I can Google for the answer). But, if that would help in extending the life of my SSD in a significant way I'd be all for it. Would that adjustment indeed help my overall goal?

Sorry so long but thanks to everyone again. This is really cool,
Dana

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: 109.5 years to kill the

Message 97384 in response to message 97382

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109.5 years to kill the drive.


So realistically it'll be something other than writes that will nail it. Obsolescence likely - and well before 10.95 years for that matter - possibly we'll have plagues of nagging nanobots or somesuch by then. Memory? They won't forget ! :-)

Anyone have a 109.5 year old magnetic platter type drive? :-) What's their expected lifetimes ?

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Jord
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RE: Anyone have a 109.5

Message 97385 in response to message 97384

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Anyone have a 109.5 year old magnetic platter type drive? :-)


Um, you must mean a gramophone disc. Yeah, I still have some of those, 78 rpm shellac versions. :-)

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What's their expected lifetimes ?


If not used and stored correctly, forever.
Otherwise, it depends on the manufacturer. In general though, with normal use, around 4-5 years? Check their "Service Life" number.

Of course, it all depends on what you call 'normal use'. :-)

Ver Greeneyes
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RE: I left a small swap

Message 97386 in response to message 97383

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I left a small swap file on the opsys drive because Windows complains if I do not. Plus, if I ever did not have access to the other drive with the large swap file on it, I would at least have something that may keep my system from crashing.


Hmm, not sure why Windows would complain if there's a swap file available on the other drive. What version of Windows are you using?

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Plus, a swap file on a RAID 0 configuration of that type and size on the motherboard controller isn't exactly professional grade and that is more disks than I have managed at once in a RAID 0 configuration thus far (and plans to add one more TB to the RAID).


To be honest, I wouldn't worry about it. The swap file is just a temporary place to put data that was in the RAM but needs to be moved out to make room for more data. Losing the data in the swap file is about as permanently damaging as losing the data in your RAM (which happens whenever you reboot or lose power), and probably far less likely.

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I did not completely understand your last suggestion on how to stop Window from using the swap file for system services. I think I need a much more of a nuts and bolts explanation on how to accomplish such a task (check that, I'm sure I can Google for the answer). But, if that would help in extending the life of my SSD in a significant way I'd be all for it. Would that adjustment indeed help my overall goal?


The relevant registry entries are DisablePagingExecutive and LargeSystemCache - both of those should reduce usage of the page file, but at the expense of using more RAM. The second one seems like it's probably pointless unless you're running a server, and it has the added caveat that changes to the system will be cached in RAM for longer - so if you lose power, you're more likely to lose system critical changes. I'd leave LargeSystemCache alone to be honest, but you should consider enabling DisablePagingExecutive. I don't know if it will significantly extend the life of your SSD - you probably don't have to worry about it in the first place - but it might well make your system more responsive, and that's always a plus. Be sure to reboot after any changes you make here, as I doubt they will become active until you do.

DanNeely
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RE: RE: I left a small

Message 97387 in response to message 97386

Quote:
Quote:
I left a small swap file on the opsys drive because Windows complains if I do not. Plus, if I ever did not have access to the other drive with the large swap file on it, I would at least have something that may keep my system from crashing.

Hmm, not sure why Windows would complain if there's a swap file available on the other drive. What version of Windows are you using?

There are two reasons windows tries to insist on a swap file. The first is that if you ever do run out of memory without one your apps will start going splut from out of memory errors. The second is that there're some apps written by idiots who think they're more capable of doing memory management than anyone working for MS and will explicitly send data to the swap file even if there's system memory free. Unsurprisingly the very large pieces of suckware these idiots are guilty of crash when there isn't a swap file for them to be clever about.

Gundolf Jahn
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RE: There are two reasons

Message 97388 in response to message 97387

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There are two reasons windows tries to insist on a swap file...


The question was: "Why would windows insist on a swap file on the system drive?" ;-)

Gruß,
Gundolf

Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

hotze33
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@ DanNeely You mention the

@ DanNeely
You mention the write amplification yourself. If you want to write 4k to a disk the disk writes 512k. So amplification is 128. For typical sequential data it is more like a factor of 1.1.
Also I have to find the source, but the 80G drive can only write like 3500 times on one cell before it may give an error. The 160G drive is more like 4500 times. These are only mainstream MLC drives.
So for a drive with 30GB free space left, this shortens the life span by a factor of 1000 compared to your calculations.
This is just the extreme calculation. Windows 7 is aware of SSDs and don´t write that much to an SSD like Vista or XP.

paul milton
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RE: RE: There are two

Message 97390 in response to message 97388

Quote:
Quote:
There are two reasons windows tries to insist on a swap file...

The question was: "Why would windows insist on a swap file on the system drive?" ;-)

Gruß,
Gundolf

im going by memory from an old smart computing magazine, but my understanding is it "requires" atleast a small one on the system drive incase of a crash, something to do with the memory dump at BSOD.. i may be completely wrong here though.

seeing without seeing is something the blind learn to do, and seeing beyond vision can be a gift.

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