5 replies to this topic

[ansichart]

Solid State Drives are based on flash technology and thus are limited to how many times you can write to them. I would like to increase the life of mine by limiting the amount of writes to it. Ideally you would want to store the Operating System on it and any other applications that benefit significantly from quicker reading speeds that don't require a lot of disk writing. I was thinking that I should create some mount points of directories that are frequently written to so they point to my HDD instead. I am thinking about setting up mounts for C:\Users and C:\Windows\Temp. What would be some other good directories to move off my SDD?

Also, I read about disabling certain services like Disk Defrag, Indexing, Super-fetch, and pre-fetch--which some software like SSDFresh does exactly this and more--I am going to check some of those out. What are some other good ideas for increasing the life?

Thanks,
ansichart

Edited by ansichart, 01 February 2012 - 12:24 AM.

[Afterm4th]

Solid State Drives are based on flash technology and thus are limited to how many times you can write to them. I would like to increase the life of mine by limiting the amount of writes to it. Ideally you would want to store the Operating System on it and any other applications that benefit significantly from quicker reading speeds that don't require a lot of disk writing. I was thinking that I should create some mount points of directories that are frequently written to so they point to my HDD instead. I am thinking about setting up mounts for C:\Users and C:\Windows\Temp. What would be some other good directories to move off my SDD?

Also, I read about disabling certain services like Disk Defrag, Indexing, Super-fetch, and pre-fetch--which some software like SSDFresh does exactly this and more--I am going to check some of those out. What are some other good ideas for increasing the life?

Thanks,
ansichart

Indexing should stay on, but super fetch and disk defrag should be turned off.

[serrath]

Just hold off on SS. The tech's ~10 years out. They've got faster access with more writes than you could possibly use coming, but it's gonna be pricey at first so it'll just be for servers for a while. Just try to skate the next 10 years out with adequate technology, 'cause all the good stuff is 10 years out. (Graphene processors, SSD, everything! Isn't it so exciting?!)

[tekio]

Use this: http://www.abelssoft.net/ssdfresh.php

Intel SSD's are factory warrantied for 5yrs, others usually about three. It's customary to keep user files on an hdd, so if they do fail easy to get files back. I've only had one SSD ever fail, and that was on purpose... pretty much all of my systems have them for a boot drive. From my experience installing an operating system is the biggest wear and tear on an SSD. A friend and I, for fun, tried to make one fail....

After about 20 standard Ubuntu installs it was toast. BUT, that used much older tech than the SSD's of today.

[ntheory]

After about 20 standard Ubuntu installs it was toast. BUT, that used much older tech than the SSD's of today.

Failed after 20 Ubuntu installs? That has to be a serious outlier. At that rate you'd have a production drive failing in probably a few weeks. I know someone who uses SSDs as the cache drives for their SAN and they haven't had any failures in a year or so.

I think that there's a lot of paranoia about burning out SSDs. You shouldn't go out of your way, unless you're testing like you were, to bury any drive with write activity but I think that being afraid to write to the drive is overkill. With a 5 year warranty and adequate backups I wouldn't worry about it in the slightest if I had the cash and the need for 500 MB / sec throughput.

Don't defrag them, it's pointless. But don't worry about wearing them out with a normal workload. That's MHO.

[serrath]

SS isn't what you want to be running, man. The memorycell tech isn't there.

For you magnetic storage fans out there:
http://www.physorg.c...eakthrough.html