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Is an SSD touched when transferring data between extHDDs?

K

kaspeish

Junior Member
SSD warranties seem to be measured in GB allowances per day and then giving a shorter lifetime of use e.g. 40GB per day for three years. I am unsure then if I will be unnecessarily shortening the life of an SSD if transferring large volumes of data between external HDDs?

For example, in OS X, if transferring 500GB via FW800 from one external HDD to another HDD connected via the Thunderbolt interface - would the SSD be used (i.e. impacted upon) in that process at all?

A test I presently cannot perform myself would be to monitor RAM activity as the transfer was in action: using Activity Monitor to view the virtual memory's page in/out levels. If the page outs are zero then it would not be using the SSD I assume, thus not shortening the SSDs life?

My machine will have 16GB of DDR3 1600 RAM when the time comes, but cannot test for this now and was hoping somebody might know?

Thanks.

ref: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6884/crucial-micron-m500-review-960gb-480gb-240gb-120gb
 
I wouldn't have thought the SSD would be utilised for such a transfer, but if you are running Win7, the disk tab of the resource monitor should provide adequate monitoring of each disk to answer your question.
 
I am not in a position to try this out but have been told the page reads (on OS X) were zero, which is encouraging.
 
If the OS keeps an index of attached drives, then it's possible that it will update the index on the OS drive. That should be very small amounts of data. Other than that, it shouldn't.
 
Interesting, I think that can be disabled, but it's nothing that I'm really worried about, it won't impact much on the GB scale.

Someone tried a 6GB transfer on a 16GB RAM machine and there were no page outs, so it looks good.
 
Use Crystal disk info.

It will show you what up! your wear and tear level your lifetime expetancy,,,, google the app and let us know or post a pic. gl
 
Page out refers only to swap. They are only indicative of going to the swap file if you're low on RAM (unlike Windows, OS X treats swap as emergency extra space only). They will only occur if you're running low on RAM.

Page ins don't matter (I'm pretty sure they're just soft faults, but I'm no OSX wiz).

You can't use either to determine what you're asking.

As to what you are asking, the SSD may get written to when copying those files, but the writes to the SSD when doing so will be negligible. They will be log additions, lock files, and the like, or the occasional search index. The amount of writes from such activities is noise.
 
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I was wondering a similar question as well. If I drive my car to work while thinking about my monitor at home will it wear out my SSD?
 
Ben90 said:
I was wondering a similar question as well. If I drive my car to work while thinking about my monitor at home will it wear out my SSD?
Click to expand...

Nothing worse than asking a valid question with someone who has too much time on their hands.
 
If your OS is on the SSD, the only thing that would be written to the SSD is the change of fiule location - very insignificant.
 
I found this to be the case also, the virtual memory only taking over in space of lack of RAM. Which at 16GB shouldn't be a problem, I wouldn't usually do anything while transferring 500GB between external HDDs anyway.

Thanks.
 
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