Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
One more thing. SSD has limited number of writes to a single memory cell before it starts to fail. This is not that bad with modern units, but still, it is something to keep in mind.
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That's around 10,000 write-cycles for 50nm, 5,000 for 34nm and 3,000 for 25nm. Another thing, if by some chance you do reach the maximum write cycles allowed for an SSD, the SSD wouldn't just stop working. You won't be able to write on it anymore but you should still be able to read your data from the device.
The SSD is more likely to die due to controller failure or some other thing before you reach the maximum write cycles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
So have enough RAM and try to eliminate needless swapping in OS. There are many HOWTOs on the net describing how to optimize system for an SSD disk.
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Beware of the advice given in some HOWTOs. While they do give sound advice such as turning off hibernation, etc, some of the advice is just overkill. For example, moving the pagefile to a mechanical drive. The pagefile is one of the things that stand to benefit a lot from an SSD so moving it to a slow mechanical drive would decrease the benefits of getting an SSD. There are folks who keep nothing but the OS on their SSD. No temp files, no programs, no games - just the OS. I wonder why they even buy SSDs. So they can boast about fast boot times?
I did calculations on SSD endurance some time ago. On a 128GB 25nm SSD, you would need to write 375TB on it before you run out of write cycles. Even at 50GB/day, it will take 20 years before you run out of write cycles. I'm a bit of a power user and the only time I even write 50GB in a day is when I defragment virtual hard disks to prepare them for compaction. Take note, I'm defragging virtual hard disks stored on the SSD, not the SSDs themselves. Defragging SSDs is totally useless because of the way the controller works. Besides, SSDs actually work better fragmented. On my OS drive, I only write around 5~10GB/day on average. That's with the pagefile on the SSD. I've tested with pagefile enabled/disabled and it didn't seem to make a noticeable difference in writes. That's considering I'm using a 32-bit OS and only have 4GB of RAM (3GB addressable). At 10GB/day, it'll take 100 years before my SSD runs out of write cycles.