a solid state drive question -- limited writes

[sightseer]

I was just reading the thread on 'what happened to choice' and I dont want to hijack it with this question.

It is mentioned in the thread that you dont want to put certain scenery on a solid state drive becuase you can wear one out by writing to it too much.

Wont Windows, by default, be writing to a solid state drive (or any drive) on a regular basis anyway?  How much difference could it make to be upgrading scenery as updates become available?

Do these drives simply have an expected short lifespan?  can the lifespan be extended by changing default Windows behaviour?  Is it relatively easy to change the windows default behaviour of writing to the disk on a constant basis?

(if Windows actually does that)

Id love to get a solid state drive but I get the impression they wont last very long.

[Guest J van E]

They will last very long. No worries about that. They won't be worn out. In the other post someone doesn't want to put specific data on his SSD because he apparently had an older SSD without TRIM: this means that over time the performance of the SSD becomes worse and worse. However, as I also posted in that topic, that problem can be overcome quite easily. And when you buy an SSD that supports TRIM, there even isn't a problem at all! I have Windows 7 and FSX on an SSD with TRIM and after four months it is just as FAST as it was the day I installed it all.

Maybe this snippet from Wikipedia will make it all a bit more clear (it's an explanation of TRIM but it also makes it very clear what the problem with older SSD's is):

In computing, a TRIM command allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (or "SSD") which data blocks, such as those belonging to a deleted file or affected by a format command, are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.

Typically, an operating system command to delete a file only means the data blocks are flagged in its file system as "not in use" (and thus available for new writes). So contrary to e.g. an overwrite operation, a delete does not involve a physical write to the sectors that contain the data. While this often enables undelete tools to recover files from traditional hard disks, despite them being reported as "deleted" by the operating system, bypassing the storage medium also means that it remains unaware internally that the status of these sectors was changed and that they can be considered free space. Because low-level operation of solid-state drives differs significantly from traditional hard disks, this approach resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. In response to this, the TRIM command was introduced to allow the OS to explicitly pass the information on to the SSD controller. This enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, that would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.

So it has nothing to do with SSD's becoming old quickly: it has everything to do with performance going down the hill, but this is easy to deal with (from the same Wikipedia page: "Where TRIM is not automatically supported by the operating system, there are utilities which can send TRIM commands manually").

I will never ever buy a regular hard disk again for regular use (maybe for backups only): SSD's are so much better and faster! No more need for defragging! They are absolutely great!!!

[tennyson]

Good reply, J.

I, too, have an Intel 160gb SSD and it's the fastest drive I've ever owned. I did the firmware upgrade on mine soon after I bought it, which added the TRIM support and I've never had a problem with it.

No need to defrag any more!

It's quiet (no moving parts), super efficient (speed) and when I paint (using Photoshop), some of those 100mb files and such open almost instantly.

I'll also never go back and I believe that the industry took a big step forward when SSD's came out.

Frank

[jgruschow]

I have had a 350 gb SSD for over six months now It is partitioned into two. Windows and all other programs on one half and FSX on the other half. It shows no sign of dieing and still runs like the day I got it.

As sombody else said, It's the best and fastest drive I have ever owned.

[sightseer]

Well all right then!  that sounds great.  Thanks J (and everyone else).

Im going to start looking into an SSD more seriously.  It always sounded great due to the obvious speed advantage.

[Atomic_Sheep]

In computing, a TRIM command allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (or "SSD") which data blocks, such as those belonging to a deleted file or affected by a format command, are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.

Typically, an operating system command to delete a file only means the data blocks are flagged in its file system as "not in use" (and thus available for new writes). So contrary to e.g. an overwrite operation, a delete does not involve a physical write to the sectors that contain the data. While this often enables undelete tools to recover files from traditional hard disks, despite them being reported as "deleted" by the operating system, bypassing the storage medium also means that it remains unaware internally that the status of these sectors was changed and that they can be considered free space. Because low-level operation of solid-state drives differs significantly from traditional hard disks, this approach resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. In response to this, the TRIM command was introduced to allow the OS to explicitly pass the information on to the SSD controller. This enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, that would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.

If I'm not mistaken, this has nothing to do with the actual wear out issue. What that is simply telling you is, as the HDD gets progressively more and more data written onto it with time and use, without TRIM what would happen is that in order to do a write operation, it had to first delete the files and then overwrite on top of them. If that's not correct then the second theory that I have about what is said there is that the software that interacted with the SSD simply didn't allow the information regarding which sectors had been flagged as deleted pass onto the database or whatever regulates how much space you have on the HDD.

Either way, this has nothing to do with the actual issue of SSD wearing out which is indeed an issue to this day. Type "ssd wear out" and have a read of a few articles. The question isn't so much do they wear out, but with the modern drives, how fast will they wear out in your particular case. The claim is that they have a similar failure rate to 7200rpm hdds which I find hard to believe. One article (3rd one that you will come across if you look for what I suggested in google), suggested that Dell had return rates of laptops of 20-30% that had solid state hdd. Although it doesn't specify whether the returns were solely due to ssd malfunction, I can tell you that a seagate 7200rmp hdd that I'm sitting on atm has a quoted failure rate of less than 1%. Can't remember the exact figure but obviouslt this is significantly lower than the other figure.

I could be wrong though.

[Guest J van E]

First of all, your second theory comes close: without TRIM the system doesn't know if a sector has become empty or not. TRIM automatically makes a deleted sector available for writing again.

About the wear of SSD's: no piece of hardware lives forever. SSD's will work for years and years but it will 'go down' one time or another. But so will regular hard disks. Due to the moving parts I think a hard disk might fail even sooner. Also, a failing hard disk will often result in a instant and sudden loss of everything that's on it (due to moving parts breaking down, rendering the entire disk useless), while SSD's will not break down but will (eventually) lose space and/or speed, while everything that's on it is still available. So there is a real difference to how hard disks and SSD's 'wear out'. I like the 'wear out' of SSD's more than that of hard disk's. I rather replace a still working but slowing down SSD in a few years than a hard disk which contents is completely lost!

Anyway, the wear out of SSD's isn't a big problem for regular users: setting up big and important servers with SSD's is another thing than using an SSD in a consumer's computer.

Mind you, I am no expert on this all... This is just what I understand from reading about it.