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Question paranoid with ssd

badbanana

Junior Member
so i got a new Samsung Evo 860 SSD replaced my primary laptop storage. works great. fast boot.

as i get used to it, i came along discussions on the dos and donts of using ssd storage and one of them is avoid too much changes like writing on the ssd.

as a result, i have
  • relocated Windows' temp directory to an external usb hdd
  • relocated Firefox's cache/temp directory to external usb hdd
  • basically any application i use i try to relocate their temp folders to the external usb hdd
question, am i being paranoid?
 
Probably, you shouldn't have to worry that much with a good quality SSD, just don't run write test benchmarks all the time. Also, what is the point of using an SSD if your apps cannot take advantage of it?

I would say, just have backups, and use it normally. It has a 5 year warranty as well.
 
Don’t move anything off the SSD. Those suggestions were back when SSDs were still in their infancy. It’s pointless to do them today. Doing them slows down your systems responsiveness overall.
 
Yeah, putting things like temp directories on external USB storage, even ignoring the relative unreliability of USB Mass Storage compared to SATA, is not going to benefit you performance-wise, and it really isn't going to increase the lifespan of the SSD all that much.

Chances are, under most average consumer workloads, even a QLC SSD will last 5 years, and a TLC one 10-15 years. MLC, probably last 50 years, but the caps on the drive might give out before then. (This is "consumer workloads". If you're running a database server, or a compilation workstation or slave build machine, you might want to go with an MLC drive, or a RAID controller with MLC SSDs.)
 
The C drive in my main PC is a 24/7 drive, just under four years old (January 2016), with around 23TB of writes on it. Works out to just under 17.6GB/day, which is quite a bit higher than the typical ~10GB/day for a consumer PC drive.

Estimated lifespan according to the manufacturer is 144TB.

It is very unlikely that you will experience an SSD failure due to NAND running out of lifetime writes.
 
Chances are, under most average consumer workloads, even a QLC SSD will last 5 years, and a TLC one 10-15 years.

Even this is very pessimistic.

The 660p 512GB is rated at 100TB writes. The older MLC drives may have had better endurance, but their capacities were a quarter of the 660p, meaning it needed to have 4x the endurance just to keep up.

Let's say the PLC drives come out with per cell endurance of 1/3 the QLC. But by then we have 2TB drives for the price of the 512GB QLC now. Then overall that PLC will still beat the endurance of the QLC drive.

5 year use of my X25-M resulted in less than 5TB of writes. Endurance claims are way, way overblown.



The thing is the endurance paranoia must be a mentality of knowing. Knowing that a cap exists, even though that cap is realistically unreachable to a vast majority of people.
 
5 year use of my X25-M resulted in less than 5TB of writes. Endurance claims are way, way overblown.

I'm on a X25-M myself still, for OS and most of my non-game programs, and nearing the 10-year mark I'm at about 20 TB of writes. Given the results of the old Techreport SSD endurance experiment, I think I've got another century or two before I have any problems 😉
 
I put my firefox cache in memory, shut off System Restore and put chrome and Google earth cache on 2nd hard drive , but I don't use those programs too much compared to firefox. Everything else I just leave as is in windows. Too much of a pain to change all that if clean installing.
 
For the last 7 years my Google Chrome cache and temp directory goes to a 2 gig ram drive which gets deleted when I shut down.Now that junk goes to a NVM drive untill I set up a new ram drive.
 
Considering you can get a good quality NVMe 1TB drive for around $100, I would use it to it's fullest potential. These things are so cheap now that I just put 24 of them into my SuperMicro ZFS server to have 24TB.
 
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