anti-virus and SSD life?

[mojothehut]

Hey all
So this is a very noob-ish question. But I've recently heard that anti-virus software and real time scanning is rather bad on SSD life? because of the constant file scanning in the background? Any truth to this? I find it a bit hard to believe that it'd be better to run w/o AV software. But I am new to SSDs.
I have a Toshiba ultra book with a 128gb SSD drive. I'm wanting to install ESET- 5 as the av software.

 

[Cerb]

Technically, it will shorten the life of the SSD, but by many orders of magnitude less than a simple single page written out to the disk. I am not aware of read disturb specs for current gen NAND, but good NAND from years ago could take millions of reads before a read disturb, and ~2005 flash could generally take hundreds of thousands. Lots of talk about it in reference to controllers, so it's probably higher now, but what's easy to find are abstracts behind paywalls.

So, in any case, yes, technically, it does affect it with all the reads, but the minute amount of writing that the A/V program is doing is far more damaging to the life of the SSD, and you'd still be hard pressed to kill a consumer one by too many writes, without giving it a server type workload for months or years on end.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Antivirus mainly reads, and you can read as much as you want on an SSD.

So essentially no, there is no truth to it.

 

[Compman55]

Its called backups.

Scan weekly and keep definitions updated. If you still get a virus, you would have gotten it anyways.

Any excess reads will shorten life.

 

[Zxian]

Any excess reads will shorten life.

False. Writes degrade SSD lifespan. Reads are just reads and do not affect the lifespan in any appreciable manner.

 

[VirtualLarry]

False. Writes degrade SSD lifespan. Reads are just reads and do not affect the lifespan in any appreciable manner.

Not entirely true. NAND "signals" do get weaker, in a miniscule way, every time you read them as well, as I understand it. Something about floating charge gates? I dunno, I'm no device physicist.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Not entirely true. NAND "signals" do get weaker, in a miniscule way, every time you read them as well, as I understand it. Something about floating charge gates? I dunno, I'm no device physicist.

And everytime you play a game your GPU degrades. Every time you compute something your CPU degrades. For every round the HD spins it degrades and lifespan gets reduced.

And so you could continue. You can basicly read the current SSDs for the next 20+ years without problems. Meaning the talk about lifespan reduction in terms of read dont have any practical value.

 

[Zxian]

Not entirely true. NAND "signals" do get weaker, in a miniscule way, every time you read them as well, as I understand it. Something about floating charge gates? I dunno, I'm no device physicist.

This is why I said "appreciable". StorageReview has shown that actual performance degradation on a SF-2281 based drive after 270TB is quite low, and read endurance is known to be significantly higher.

Anti-Virus scans will have no more impact on drive life than any other common task.

 

[mojothehut]

Thanks guys for the helpful info, I appreciate it.
ESET installed

 

[kbp]

Well - try disabling your AV for awhile and let us know how it works.
I think i'll keep mine "on" and reading all it wants. I do not want a virus writing anything to my drives.

 

[VirtualLarry]

And so you could continue. You can basicly read the current SSDs for the next 20+ years without problems. Meaning the talk about lifespan reduction in terms of read dont have any practical value.

Not true. Patriot rated the data lifetime of their Torx SSDs at five years max.

Which is interesting, when you consider that their warranty on those same SSDs was/is ten years.

This suggests that you should image, secure-erase, and restore your SSD every, say, three years, or you might end up with unreadable files if you let them "sit" on the NAND for more than five years.

 

[Zxian]

I'm fairly certain that the data lifetime they mentioned is the lifetime of data for an unpowered drive. As long as a drive is used regularly, there should be no reason why an SSD would lose any previously written data.

 

[KingFatty]

From what I understand, when an SSD "dies" it simply becomes a read-only drive, sort of like turning into a giant CDR.

 

[KingFatty]

Not true. Patriot rated the data lifetime of their Torx SSDs at five years max.

Which is interesting, when you consider that their warranty on those same SSDs was/is ten years.

This suggests that you should image, secure-erase, and restore your SSD every, say, three years, or you might end up with unreadable files if you let them "sit" on the NAND for more than five years.

This is troubling to hear if true. I assume it is, but would you have any citation or document to back up this claim of 5-year data lifetime?

 

[2is]

Antivirus mainly reads, and you can read as much as you want on an SSD.

So essentially no, there is no truth to it.

This. Also, the corsair drive in my sig is a carryover from my previous system. It was used as my system drive then and is dedicated to my steam games now, it's a couple years old and Crystal Disk Info still shows it at 100% health.

As far as patriot drives are concerned. I wouldn't buy one. My cousin has a 100% failure rate on them, he's had 4. He's not an idiot that he made the same mistake 4 times, he got two initially (one for desktop one for laptop) both failed, then both RMAs failed.

 

[Cerb]

This is troubling to hear if true.

Why so? I've had HDDs suffer from bitrot in only 1 year.

I don't like that most makers are cagey about such metrics (the tech isn't static, and these kinds of specs seem to get worse as it gets smaller, in general), and that many people have a false sense of security, thinking data on any flash will last forever. But if they have those numbers, and are willing to share them, 5 years is not bad at all.

This suggests that you should image, secure-erase, and restore your SSD every, say, three years, or you might end up with unreadable files if you let them "sit" on the NAND for more than five years.

No, just that you might need to do a virus scan , or if that's not easily available, dd with of=/dev/null. Just using it will also work. Writing a few GBs/day should be enough to for it to eventually go over that old block, notice worse errors than it should have, and move it.

Personally, I would want an SSD to keep an internal TTL for static data, which would prioritize older data blocks for use in wear-leveling, and also include a plan B that would check pages left alone too long (not read in months due to low drive write usage). Most controllers definitely do the first, though I would suspect most also effectively implement the latter, though through more complicated means (SSDs don't have access to a reliable RTC).

 

[Davis442]

If there were any truth to come close to the hype of writing to an SSD (let alone the laughable effect of reading), the SSD drives of 12 hour-a-day perma-writers (e.g. professional gamers), would have died in one to two years, well ahead of expert findings from tests. Read and write away, but avoid deep writes (e.g. "wipes"), or unnecessarily frequent ones (e.g. defrags).

PS: If that isn't humorous enough: If an SSD drive happened to be abused maximally (excluding deep writes), its replacement would be nearly free, six months prior to it beginning to fail, and likely faster & larger in space. SSD research serves to satisfy inevitable curiosities, but presents no practical value. Thanks to the rate of price depreciation, perfect drive cloning, & the easiest swap there is, SSD's have solved their "problem" even before it exists. For the extra mindful, there are actually ways to monitor your SSD's health, but who would hold onto their SSD long enough for that to be meaningful?