What shouldnt I put on an SSD?

Zorac877

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Nov 13, 2014
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I recently ordered a 240Gb M500 Crucial SSD. In anticipation of getting it ive been watching quite a few videos dealing with boot times and management. One of the things I noticed a lot was the indefinite read/write of the drives, and that kinda worries me. If anyone could, is there some sort of master list of what not to do on an SSD? I know not to defragment, and some other stuff. But the main thing that im concerned about is that I do a lot of server hosting from my computer, mainly Garry's Mod and Minecraft. Would that be detrimental to the drive?

If anyone could make some sort of cheat sheet or anything, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you.
 
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This was written two years ago. SSD longevity has gotten even better since then.

There aren't a lot of stats available for SSDs lasting 8 years+ because SSDs have only been around a little less than that and have really only become popular in the last 2 years or so as prices have dropped. 8 years is a long time for HDDs to last and HDDs life expectancy has more to do with time than number of writes. HDDs have moving parts, grease than dry up, bearings that can go bad. I wouldn't be concerned with the limited number of writes for an SSD as they have wear leveling and you would need to write the equivalent of of hundreds if not thousands of times the SSD's capacity to even come close. In short, go with the SSD, there is no garentee...
This was written two years ago. SSD longevity has gotten even better since then.

There aren't a lot of stats available for SSDs lasting 8 years+ because SSDs have only been around a little less than that and have really only become popular in the last 2 years or so as prices have dropped. 8 years is a long time for HDDs to last and HDDs life expectancy has more to do with time than number of writes. HDDs have moving parts, grease than dry up, bearings that can go bad. I wouldn't be concerned with the limited number of writes for an SSD as they have wear leveling and you would need to write the equivalent of of hundreds if not thousands of times the SSD's capacity to even come close. In short, go with the SSD, there is no garentee either HDDs or SSDs will last 8 years, but I can garentee you'll be very happy with the performance and SSD will give you versus an HDD.

The first thing to do, is make sure the SSD is aligned:

http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance

The second thing to do, is make sure all the data is backed up somewhere else, which should be done regardless if it's a hard drive, SSD or you have some kind of Star Trek-ish bio-mechanical storage media. (Kidding)

The third thing to do is make sure you have the most recent firmware.

I'd also take a read of these articles and also take everything with a grain of salt. I don't serve data, so I can't speak to that, but I do have SSD's I've been writing to for several years that have never died or exhibited any issues. I generally write about 40-50GB of data per week to those drives.

If you will be serving a lot of data it might be worthwhile to go with a hybrid drive or server class SSD.


http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2025402/ssds-vs-hard-drives-vs-hybrids-which-storage-tech-is-right-for-you-.html


I would note that, while it's common knowledge, most people vastly overestimate how fast they'll run out of writes on an SSD. Intel specifically states you can write over 21GB a day for ten years straight without exhausting the writes on their consumer-level drives.

Also important to note is that reading data, in the case of serving it up, does NOT affect nor decrease it's lifespan whatsoever. Writing is the only thing that causes the drives life to shorten. If you write 240GB of data to a drive and use it to ONLY serve data, never writing to it again, it should theoretically last forever, or at least as long as it's electronics continue to operate which as we all know can be two days or twenty five years for any given electronic device.


 
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