How long will it take for Windose to thrash a small SSD?

[amd6502]

I'm thinking of using a smaller SSD (~120GB) and using a partition slightly smaller than 110GB to install Win10 on (as C: drive). I'm wondering how long it will take for windose to degrade the SSD if:

a.) I do a straight install.
b.) I take minor precaution and disable the swap file on C: (and say move/enable swap file to a ferromagnetic drive D: )

Second question is, once windose is finished thrashing this partition, will this destruction affect the reliability and performance of the remaining ~10GB partition (which will be used for linux /usr/ ) on the SSD?

Also somewhat curious about the same question, but with an even smaller SSD, 60GB (so with a 50GB for windose C: drive). Will it simply degrade at roughly twice the pace (110/50=2.2)?

Does either of these have a clear durability advantage: SP120GBSS3S55S25AE or SU128GBSS3A55S25AC ?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had Windows 7 64-bit (in it's early years, when it would fit on a 30GB SSD), and after a few months of distributed computing, it had used 25% lifespan of the drive. But it didn't have much free space.

I think deciding to allocate the *entire* SSD (even if divided between Windows and Linux), is a mistake, that is going to lead to higher wearout. Leave like 20% free space on the drive, or at least 10%.

I would recommend a 240/256GB SSD, and give 128GB to Windows, and 80GB to Linux.

 

[whm1974]

If you must dual boot, you are much better off getting two drives and installing each OS and its bootloader on their own drive. Otherwise Windows can and will mess with the Linux partition.

 

[richaron]

"Thrashing" conventionally means a different thing. Usually it's when the system is completely tying up IO from a drive used as virtual random access memory when the system is paging/swapping (after RAM is full). I guess "thrashing" can be analogous to "abusing" in other situations, but I don't think a simple windoze install counts as such.

Modern SSD drives and drivers balance out the physical wear over the available space. And they also keep some memory hidden as backup in case some areas do fail. In both cases the larger drive has more.

And if I understand correctly the load balancing via drivers wont affect other partitions, so yes maybe the physical memory which store the OS might have more wear. But I'm not sure how any load balancing or "spare" space is managed via firmware.

 

[amd6502]

If you must dual boot, you are much better off getting two drives and installing each OS and its bootloader on their own drive. Otherwise Windows can and will mess with the Linux partition.

Hi thanks to all the feedback; any further experience from others would be useful to get a better idea.

I think I won't try with a 60gb drive (thanks Larry!) but will risk my 120gb SSD, with only a tiny partition where I'll mount the /usr/ partition (it only uses a few gigabytes, about 5gb, so a tiny ~10gb partition will be fine for linux). I'll use a conventional drive (or seagate hybrid) alongside which will be used for windose D:, including it's swap file, plus for the linux / partition and the linux bootloader. (Windows shouldn't mess with a bootloader on the second drive that hosts D: )

I think I'll end up with a well over 50% free space when I use110GB windows install. (I'm guessing a fresh win10 install should be no more than ~15 to 20GB.)

The newer driver have made some improvements like SLC cache. The TLC (tri level cell) model also sounds more durable than your typical MLC, especially the earlier generation ones.

I'm still not sure what will happen like in 3 to 5 years when windows does degrade the drive. It's possible that internally what represents the partitions are totally different than what one would expect, so that even if linux does not wear the /usr/ linux partition with rewrites, that the usage from C: partition would affect the cells that are used to house the linux partition's data. If I measure a wear rate that's higher than what's expected I'll definitely report back on it soon.

 

[TheELF]

Don't put your swap on a different drive,the whole point of SSDs is to have better speeds...also microsoft has done a lot of work towards minimizing writes to the swap(which is why windows uses up all your mem now)

Also free space isn't really all that important,what is important is how much of the data is going to be (re) written to the drive and how often,SSDs use wear leveling(it will actually move a chunk of data that hasn't changed for a long time to write the new/changed data there) every time they have to write to the drive so only the amount of writing is important, the drive can be 99% full if there is only minimal writing the SSD will last forever.

Also SSDs have a lot more write cycles than people tend to think they have a SSD will last you a lot of years.

 

[JackMDS]

I do not think that the problem is the size.

I carefully tried most options, my experience even putting Win10 on 60GB SSD and an other type of OS on a secondary SSD controlling the Boot through EZBCD placed on Win 10 provides the Best Result.

There are numerous amount of the reason for it. The most important ones are isolating the Action of Win 10 "Schizo" Update and Telemetry from the second OS (even if the second OS on the second SSD is another Win version).

Using two SSD and EZBCD also neutralize the functional differences between the BIOS of the newer computers as coconut by many Vendors to what they perceptive as their advantage.

Beside this if you have two SSDs and one of them get Trashed you still have a functional computer to use until you fix the problem.