New SSD setup question

[stylez777]

Hey all,

So I am going to install my first SSD tonight I have read all the setup FAQ's about tweaks to windows how to partition etc etc.

It is hard to weed out old information from the new information so I was confused about something. Obviously the small random write lower drive longevity and it's still a majority opinion not to have programs that do this on your SSD. What about your web browser and cache? I have not found any usefull recent info about what to do with this. Do people still move their temp files to a storage hdd? Setup a ram disk if you have enough ram or do they not even care anymore and just leave it on the ssd?

If it matters I am setting up a Chronos Deluxe and I'll have 8gb of RAM on z68 chipset board. I normally use Firefox as a browser (dunno why just been using it long time and it works for me). Any tips or info about this would be helpful. Thanks!

 

[Jman13]

If you use your drive normally, it should last for many years. Things not to do:

DON'T DEFRAG IT. Windows should detect it's an SSD and turn off defrag for it, but make sure it's not doing it.

Don't benchmark it 5000 times. That's a lot of data over and over and over. Don't be afraid to benchmark it or anything, just don't feel the need to do it 4 times a day, every day.

Disable Windows Indexing. Eats up a lot of read/writes and isn't really necessary given the speed of the drive in the first place.

Other than that, don't worry about it. There's one thread on some forum where people are basically writing as much data to their SSDs as humanly possible to see how long they last before failure, and most of the good ones are lasting well beyond rated life...and rated life should probably last you 6-9 years. Some have written enough data to go around the horn on 'rated life' for read/writes as many as 3-4 times. We're talking 150-300 TB of data written to the drive.

Even if you use it heavily, you'll likely not write more than 10GB a day. At 150TB of writes, you're talking 41 years at 10GB a day. Now, the rated life is much less than that, but even at, say, 30TB of data total, you're looking at 8 years before the drive gives out. And you'll likely NOT write 10GB a day. By that time you'll be on a new drive.

 

[stylez777]

Appreciate the info. Most of that stuff I read and logged into memory

I was mostly worried about the web browser cache and the writes. I know many people use Ramdisk for that just wasn't sure with these new SSD's if people still were doing that or just keeping it on the SSD.

 

[mkmitch]

There is a lot of advice out there, two things I did was turn of hibernate and reduce page file size. I bought a 90GB Corsair so eliminating useless space is a good idea.

 

[iluvdeal]

You have enough RAM to create a RAM disk, I'd move your firefox cache there regardless of whether it prolongs the life of your SSD for a couple reasons: RAM disk will be faster cache than SSD and it gets deleted on reboots since it's on RAM disk.

 

[Sunburn74]

Don't bother with a ramdisk. You will never be able to wear out the flash on your SSD ever. The evidence suggests that SSD lifecycles are grossly underestimated. Google "xtreme forums SSD endurance testing" for a greater discussion, but yeah you will never wear out the flash. For example, I owned a couple of 80gb x-25ms in raid 0 for 3 years. In that time period I put a little more than 4Tb worth of writes on each drive (so 8TB in total). Intel rates these drives for minimum of 36 TB worth of writes over their lifetime (20gb a day for 5 years) as a conservative estimate. Intel's unconservative estimate is actually 182 TB over (100gb a day for 5 years). When people actually test, they are hitting like 300TB worth of writes without any problems. All that being said, in 3 years I ONLY USED 8TB worth of writes before I upgraded to newer, larger drives which have even better wear leveling and write amplification algorithms.

Just use it as you would a hard drive. RAM disks have all sorts of issues and can cause crashes in windows as well.

 

[groberts101]

ramdisks can often be be more helpful about reducing the amount of dirty blocks in any particular logged on session and reduce the GC requirements, as well. This can be monumental in the ability to use smaller/midsized capacities in heavier write load environments.

I suspect that some have no clue as to how much data gets scratched to the C-drive when just simply surfing the net. then add HD vids to that equation?.. it can slow a 60GB drive down to the point of needing forced trims and idle time recovery. Ramdisks can soak up some of that and shouldn't be underestimated from a "fresh block conservation" standpoint. Fancycache by Romex even trims redundantly accessed data from the ram to avoid flushing all that temp trash to the drive.

So, while I would tend to agree that most will not see enough benefit to warrant messing with them?.. ramdisks and caching software have their advantages.

 

[Sunburn74]

There shouldn't be any slowdown. The drive has working trim and the amounts of writes involved with IE temp files, win7 OS temp files, and os background service files is tiny.

The problems I ran into with a ramdisk was.
1) I was always afraid to restart my PC or shut it down because I'd lose all my IE temp information particuarly passwords and saved searched.
2) Windows would crash because a 4gb ramdisk fills up very quickly and when there was no longer space to write the additional temp files the OS would crash.

Like I said, if you browse xtreme forums SSD endurance testing, it'll be clear to you that its pretty much impossible for a consumer to wear out the flash on a drive. Just use your SSD as a normal hard drive and stop worrying.

 

[bradley]

SSDs that employ independent ramdisks and caches will recover from excessive writes a lot quicker, and remain in a fresh state longer. Everyone likes speed. Ram and GiliSoft's RAMDisk (most excellent, btw) are both cheap and FancyCache is free.

Obviously you get the added benefit of reduced wear-and-tear. You don't need to be an alarmist to see these as good things. Oh, and they are fun to play with.

 

[groberts101]

There shouldn't be any slowdown. The drive has working trim and the amounts of writes involved with IE temp files, win7 OS temp files, and os background service files is tiny.

The problems I ran into with a ramdisk was.
1) I was always afraid to restart my PC or shut it down because I'd lose all my IE temp information particuarly passwords and saved searched.
2) Windows would crash because a 4gb ramdisk fills up very quickly and when there was no longer space to write the additional temp files the OS would crash.

Like I said, if you browse xtreme forums SSD endurance testing, it'll be clear to you that its pretty much impossible for a consumer to wear out the flash on a drive. Just use your SSD as a normal hard drive and stop worrying.

yeah.. but those "problems" can be eliminated by using better ramdisk software. One that has the ability to store/reload the ramdisk files at reboot.

And I would ask this. If you had a 4 gig ramdisk and it wasn't sufficient in size?.. then you obviously write more than 4 gigs to the C-drive during a normal logged on session. Also, that's not taking into account how large HD vids can be when you don't move the browser cache and go beyond "typical writeloads" in a particular session.

So, the point was that we should not be so worried about those gigs of writes to the drive from a lifespan perspective.. but more from the viewpoint of eliminating the need to clean those blocks up in recovery.

Then if we add a smaller capacity drive with 70% statically stored data.. or even a 120GB model being 85% full into the mix?.. you can and do see benefits from implementing ramdisk/caching software. This would be based on the simple fact that trim marked block recovery is not instantaneous and without its own inherent limitation per each type of controller used.

Some controllers are certainly better than others but with all the variables and usage deviations being mixed in?.. there can be no blanket statements made about "what's needed" or not.