SSD´s and durability - anand says 7GB writes a day?

[Gothmoth88]

hello and excuse my english.... i try to make it clear what im after. 😉

anandtech wrote that a typical desktop pc has around 7GB writes a day.
and that a SSD buyer has not to worry about the only 3000-5000 writes cycles a 25nm flash SSD is good for.

but imho this 7GB a day is more true for a office/internet pc and i wonder why you need a SSD for an office PC.

i think most people who buy an SSD are power user.
user who need as much speed as they can get.

i work a lot with 2D tools (like photoshop, lightroom, after effects, premiere pro).

when i start photoshop and load a single image then photoshop creates a cache file that is 600MB-1.2GB big. every time i load another of my TIF file photoshop writes ~ 100MB into the cachefile.

i have process monitor running for 2 hours (while i do my normal day to day work, mostly photoshop) and im already at 6GB writes.

so i think that for me 3000 write cycles could be a problem.... not?
i have put my cache files onto a normal HDD.
with my 8GB ram system i did not notice a performance gain with the photoshop cache file on the SSD.

what are your thoughts?
are 7GB writes a day really common for SSD users or do you write more?

 

[=Wendy=]

It will vary from user to user, but 7GB per day seems like a reasonable average for a desktop PC.
Unless you're writing something like 200GB to a 120GB drive per day. I don't think there is much to worry about.

Having said that. It depends on how much free space you have on the SSD.

 

[Zap]

i wonder why you need a SSD for an office PC.

Time = Money

 

[Voo]

but imho this 7GB a day is more true for a office/internet pc and i wonder why you need a SSD for an office PC.

Wait, if a typical office/internet user writes anywhere near 7gb per day to the drive I'd be extremely perplexed.

Anyways Intel guarantues 100gb/day for their 34nm SSDs and that's still a good bit lower than the theoretical lifecycle. So even if 25nm SSDs have only half the PE cycles (and the NAND specs I see it vary between 3/5 and the same numbers - probably because they underrated the 34nm flash) that's still quite a lot of data.

And does PM differentiate between memory mapped files, etc. and real write operations to the disk? Wouldn't be too sure about that - iirc it only shows IO ops, but then I could be wrong there. But doublechecking wouldn't harm - just write a small testcase to see what it counts.

 

[groberts101]

I use Adobe Master Suite and don't want to even think about all the minutes per day of wasted time when I spun things to and from my raid arrays. Even ramdisks will only get you so far for time saved.

As for the lifespan estimates of SSD?.. just do the simple math and calculate the PE/c rating of the nand used, times the total capacity of the drive. A 128GB drive with 3000 PE/c would write 384,000 gigs/375 Terabytes before burnout would be an issue.

So, however you divy that figure up in per day usage?.. it would be almost silly to worry about burning the drive unless it was a file server environment running hard 24/7. This is why capacity is the greatest defense against degradation.

 

[a123456]

I use Adobe Master Suite and don't want to even think about all the minutes per day of wasted time when I spun things to and from my raid arrays. Even ramdisks will only get you so far for time saved.

As for the lifespan estimates of SSD?.. just do the simple math and calculate the PE/c rating of the nand used, times the total capacity of the drive. A 128GB drive with 3000 PE/c would write 384,000 gigs/375 Terabytes before burnout would be an issue.

So, however you divy that figure up in per day usage?.. it would be almost silly to worry about burning the drive unless it was a file server environment running hard 24/7. This is why capacity is the greatest defense against degradation.

Yeah, you can vaguely estimate the lifetime of the SSD by just multiplying it out. Then figure out how much you write each day and that will tell you about how long the SSD might last for. Each SSD does have some over provisioning so make sure to take that into account.

There are some issues like write amplification and compression on some controllers that may skew the data a little but it's a ballpark estimate anyway.

It's thought that the 3k-5k estimate is actually pretty conservative but most people won't even come close to the limit.

As a point of reference, I only use about 5GB/day but it can obviously vary wildly depending on what you're doing.

You could experiment with ramdisks also just for kicks if SSDs are too slow.