Question SATA SSD Usage

[CyclicUser]

I am storing music on a SATA SSD for playback. Does it matter if the drive is filled 100% if the files are only going to be read? I suspect not , but I would like other opinions.

 

[bigboxes]

I am storing music on a SATA SSD for playback. Does it matter if the drive is filled 100% if the files are only going to be read? I suspect not , but I would like other opinions.

You never want to go 100%. You should leave 20-30% empty. You need space for garbage collection, read only or not. Just buy another drive. Add to your existing one if you have the space. Replace with a larger capacity if you are limited to the one drive.

 

[Billy Tallis]

Leaving 20-30% of the usable space empty is overkill unless you have a very write-intensive workload. For a workload that's almost 100% reads, there's nothing wrong with filling the entire usable capacity of the drive. There's still several GB of spare area behind the scenes even when the usable capacity is completely full.

 

[CyclicUser]

Interesting! In this case I have A SATA SSD whose only purpose is to be the storage media for music. I am only going to write an album to it once. I'll keep adding to it until it reaches its limits.
So. What happens to a segment that is written to once and then read multiple times? Can the segment go bad? Does the controller sense that the segment is failing and rewrite that segment to another segment? Over time, will 20-30% of segments, written to once, go bad? Does it all depend on which controller is used?

 

[mindless1]

There is nothing wrong with filling to capacity for write-once, though is it really never going to rewrite a little remaining space? Probably not enough to matter in this case.

Nothing happens to a write-once then read multiple times, though over years it will suffer bit rot so every few years (less than 10 to be on the safe side) you should (format or delete, whatever then) write everything back to it again. It's just the memory losing its charge, not "failing" in an electronic sense like it would from too many write cycles.

In your use there should be no concerns about wearing it out or the factors mentioned. Which controller is used doesn't change that, is inherent in existing flash tech.

 

[CyclicUser]

Just to expand. I have an ASUS H370 MATX board with an Intel Core I-3 8100 chip. It is in a 2-U rackmount case. In the M2 slots I have installed a 500GB Samsung 970 Pro and a Samsung 2TB 860. I am using the onboard video. The PSU is a high end Seasonic, which I have had good luck with in the past. The purpose of this system is to be a music "jukebox". I installed the OS and the music software on the 970 Pro C: drive. And Samsung Magician. The 860 SATA drive will only be used for music files. I removed the hard drive cages to open up the interior of the case. I have 2 80mm Noctua fans at the front of the case and a Noctua chip cooler. The PSU and the cage for the 5 1/4 drives are to the other side. In operation the system is extremely quiet. It is no louder than a CD player. This unit is installed in my music system.
My intent was to build a long term system. At this point in my life, I suspect that this will be the last such system that I will build. I don't think that I will ever reach the endurance limits of the 970 Pro. I don't have the 860 hardly filled but I continue to add music. With the 860 being used basically as a read only disc I don't think that I would ever reach its endurance limits. I was concerned with how much of its capacity I could utilize before it affected its functionality in this situation.
I thank everyone for their contributions.

 

[Billy Tallis]

So. What happens to a segment that is written to once and then read multiple times? Can the segment go bad? Does the controller sense that the segment is failing and rewrite that segment to another segment? Over time, will 20-30% of segments, written to once, go bad? Does it all depend on which controller is used?

SSDs have multiple layers of error correction. A read disturb error can happen: where repeatedly reading for a memory cell causes a slight change in voltage of that cell or a nearby cell. It generally takes a lot of reads to cause a read disturb error. The SSD's lower layers of error correction will catch such errors and return corrected data to the host system (possibly with a bit of delay, depending on how hard it was to reconstruct the correct data). When the SSD controller notices the raw read error rate for a block is getting uncomfortably high and putting data at risk of being unrecoverable, it will re-write a fresh copy of that data to a different memory block and erase the block that was originally storing the data.

So reading data a lot can eventually, gradually cause a bit of wear on the SSD, but you'll never exhaust the write endurance of the drive through reads alone.

Most SSDs don't automatically scan all their contents for data degradation on a regular basis, though some with NAND that's particularly prone to leakage will. It's a good idea to periodically re-read the entire contents of the drive, to ensure that it can still be read without error and to allow the drive to refresh any data that is starting to degrade. Doing this once or twice a year should be sufficient, but it won't hurt to do it more often. Manually re-writing data periodically should not be necessary, but given how the rest of your workload is read-only, manually re-writing data once or twice a year will also not put much of a dent in the drive's rated write endurance.

 

[mindless1]

Just to expand. I have an ASUS H370 MATX board with an Intel Core I-3 8100 chip. It is in a 2-U rackmount case. In the M2 slots I have installed a 500GB Samsung 970 Pro and a Samsung 2TB 860. I am using the onboard video. The PSU is a high end Seasonic, which I have had good luck with in the past. The purpose of this system is to be a music "jukebox". I installed the OS and the music software on the 970 Pro C: drive. And Samsung Magician. The 860 SATA drive will only be used for music files. I removed the hard drive cages to open up the interior of the case. I have 2 80mm Noctua fans at the front of the case and a Noctua chip cooler. The PSU and the cage for the 5 1/4 drives are to the other side. In operation the system is extremely quiet. It is no louder than a CD player. This unit is installed in my music system.
My intent was to build a long term system. At this point in my life, I suspect that this will be the last such system that I will build. I don't think that I will ever reach the endurance limits of the 970 Pro. I don't have the 860 hardly filled but I continue to add music. With the 860 being used basically as a read only disc I don't think that I would ever reach its endurance limits. I was concerned with how much of its capacity I could utilize before it affected its functionality in this situation.
I thank everyone for their contributions.

Must be great music software because that's a ton of hardware value and electricity to throw at merely playing music.

Otherwise you could just use a SD card or USB flash drive capable input source to the amp, or plug a USB flash drive into a router capable of DLNA and have network access.

 

[CyclicUser]

Yes, the music software is in fact great. It allows me to make multiple play sheets. It differentiates music types, so that I can play Christmas music at Christmas and so on. It displays album art. It does in fact do a large number of useful things. I expect that over time it will have several thousand albums on it. I am hoping to have at least a ten year life span for this machine. This machine was originally going to be used for a different purpose. It was repurposed to this use when its original use became nonexistent. It will be in a separate building than the one that contains my network.
Thank you for your concern.