Indilinx (OCZ Onyx) lifetime

[fuzzymath10]

I put an Onyx into my living room PC so that my hard drives could spin down. Using crystaldiskinfo, I notice that the life status is dropping quite quickly; I installed it less than a month ago and it's dropped from 98% to 95%. I have no idea what's causing all the writes since the drive is only about 35% full.

At 1% a week, this seems unusually fast. The same measurement on my Intel G1 SSDs is also around 95-96% but one of them I've had since April 2009 and the other since Nov 2009.

I think the percentage is calculated in terms of average erase cycles divided by the rated lifespan. In the Onyx case, this is about 250 cycles out of 5000.

Is this a concern, or can I just use the system normally and hope for the best? OS is 2008 R2.

 

[Mark R]

This is 'normal' for indilinx controller SSDs. Indilinx controllers put about 10-30x as many writes on the flash as other makes of controller. So handling big media files, e.g. TV captures, or video downloads will cause an inordinate amount of flash wear.

There have been a number of threads here about this. One guy put an indilinx SSD in a game server, and the life status went down 1% per day. Another guy had an indilinx SSD in a regular desktop PC (used for normal office stuff) and the life status went down 2% a week.

That said, I've never heard a convincing story of one of these drives actually 'wearing out'. I've heard of drives just dieing randomly, but not yet heard of someone driving the life status down to 0 first.

 

[superccs]

You do the Winders tweaks for SSD dirves?

Swap file, restore, disk cache... all -> off

 

[fuzzymath10]

That kinda sucks. I figured any SSD whose feedback was reasonably positive (billed as a decent alternative to Intel way back when) would have WA under control. I wonder if idle garbage collection is a factor since it's on 24/7; I might put it back in my laptop and get an Intel SSD.

It was $40 for me after rebate so not a big deal I guess....as long as it works for a little while 🙂