New box, memory problem

[rikona]

Saturday, October 22, 2016, 9:11:59 AM, Liam wrote:

> The OP asked for advice; I gave my opinion.

I appreciate your opinion.

> Nobody's replies here have convinced me it was wrong.

It is not necessarily a case of right or wrong. You are technically
correct about things that increase writing to the disk. The real
question has to do with the significance in the real world. To quote
from one of the articles you referenced "we've watched modern SSDs
easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need".

SSDs do wear leveling as well as other techniques to help maximize
life. The OS sees virtual sectors, and the disk controller moves
blocks around all the time so that all the cells on the disk will have
roughly the same number of write cycles. Since this is done by the
disk controller there was no need for me to set aside unallocated
space when formatting the disk - don't follow that example. That space
will be used by the disk controller in any case.

Newer consumer grade SSDs typically *guarantee* being able to write
around seven complete disk fulls of data every day for five years. An
extensive recent failure test of several SSDs added some interesting
numbers. Even for the WORST tested SSD, you would have to write 204 GB
of data every day for 10 years. I'd guess that most people don't write
anywhere near that much data to the disk. 

A SanDisk article had an interesting comparison between SSDs and HDs
in which they noted that an SSD has about twice as long a MTBF as an
HD. 

Given wear leveling, it would seem that oversize disks would be an
advantage in extending the disk lifetime. My SSD is only about 5%
full, so I have plenty of space for wear leveling - perhaps giving me
20 times as much life as it would have if the disk were full.  

Given the above, I'm less worried than before about wearing out my
SSD. I think I'll keep some of the techniques, such as journaling,
that increase reliability even though it does increase writing a bit -
for normal operation journaling only increases writes by about 4% to
12%. I will accept that. I think I'll also keep my much less used swap
space on the SSD as well, to improve the performance if and when it is
needed. Data bases will stay on the HD though [their normal location].

From what I've seen SSD failures seem to be catastrophic, so I will
want to do SSD clones on a rather frequent basis. 

Other things to consider: Don't use hibernation. Don't defrag or
write-test the disk.

Thanks to you and all for the info!

-- 

 rikona