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Serious question: Is 12GB a day really going to make a dent in your SSD's lifespan? I was under the impression that, with modern SSDs, you basically didn't have

Serious question: Is 12GB a day really going to make a dent in your SSD's lifespan? I was under the impression that, with modern SSDs, you basically didn't have to worry about this stuff.

gcp 10y ago
Samsung's low cost line is under warranty up to 40TB/year. Tests have shown that the actual drive lifetime is several times that. So basically, no, you don't have to worry about this. Essentially, people are complaining that the disks they bought are being used for their intended purpose: making sure your data doesn't disappear on a power loss.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Not everyone buys Samsung, there are a lot of cheap SSD's out there that are rated for only a handful of TB's a year. There is also a case of the silly SSHD's or w/e which combine a tiny SSD and a mechanical component which can die considerably faster. Overall the amount of writes an SSD can handle is tied directly to it's capacity since it determines the amount of average writes per a given time unit that each cell will experience as long as the firmware actually does it's job (in Samsung's case it may very well not do it as they had more than a few firmware screw ups in the past). This can also more severely affect you if you have a medium sized drive (say 128-256GB) but it's pretty full. A good SSD's will move things around somewhat to even out the wear but it still increases the amount of writes you have. If your SSD does have an "even wear" feature when you write 12GB to drive which is say 50% or more full it usually triggers more than 12GB of effective writes in the drive itself as the firmware would move already written data around to ensure that every cell has been written to approximately the same amount (if you say only have 20GB of free space and you write 12GB daily and delete it, your effective writes would be closer to the full capacity of the drive per day than to 12GB). You also have a lot of embedded/mobile devices which use considerably shittier storage than modern SSD's, you can easily chew through a SD card or a similarly rated flash storage with anywhere between a few 100's of gigs to only a handful of TB's (or a only few times the capacity of the card if buy bargain bin memory cards). Since these machines are more commonly used these days it's not a feature that should be so quickly obfuscated from the user since it doesn't seem like there is an "intelligence" behind how conservative or not the browser is with writes to local storage. If you install firefox on an SBC/netbook/microcomputer or even a mobile phone (if this affects the mobile version also) with eMMC/MMC only rated storage 12 gigs a day can and will kill it rather quickly.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    this was a very insightful comment, thank you!
  - dsr_ 10y ago
    Android Firefox has this set to 10 seconds, rather than the 15 on a desktop.
    - creshal 10y ago
      And Pale Moon (Firefox fork) to 60.
      - gcp 10y ago
        Firefox's session restore code was recently rewritten. Given that Pale Moon is based on an outdated fork, it's not clear the behavior is comparable, or that the setting means the same.
    - gcp 10y ago
      Android suspends backgrounded applications, and will kill them at will, so that actually makes a lot of sense: you have less risk of data loss, and the write issue doesn't exist unless you leave the browser in the foreground 24/7 (and the phone unlocked with the screen on etc).
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      I don't know what this translates too for a mobile device, I don't know if it stores the same data, and how does the fact that mobile sites tend to be light affects it. Other things like add ons, amount of tabs open and etc. could also affect it. Would be interesting to see if some one has SBC's with either SD or onboard eMMC rated storage to run this test and see how much is being written too and calculate just how much of the lifespan of the storage is being reduced due to this. IIRC even the iPhone 6s still uses TLC flash for it's storage, TLC is only good for about 500-1000 P/E cycles, so it needs pretty good capacity overhead and well "TLC" to live long. In comparison SLC gets you over 100K P/E cycles these days, MLC can get to over 30K. Also if anyone knows if mobile phones do wear leveling for their eMMC/MMC storage I would love to know that ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nathanaldensr 10y ago
  No, "people" are not complaining about that; it's a fine attempt at a straw man, though. What the article complains about through implication is that Firefox is unnecessarily writing too much data to disk.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Why would it be unnecessary? The amount of data follows rather logically from the amount of website state it's capturing, and the interval seems totally like personal preference to me. Would you rather lose 60 seconds of work or 15? Uh, I'll take less data loss.
    - pixl97 10y ago
      In a web browser? You're acting like the browser is a major local storage application (like excel for example), almost everything I'm going to be working on is an online application, and it takes care of storing my data on the server infrastructure. So yea, 15 seconds or 60 seconds isn't going to be a major 'data loss' issue either way.
      - gcp 10y ago
        it takes care of storing my data on the server infrastructure Do you manually hit the save button every 15 seconds? Some webapps do this for you. Some do not. Firefox has got your ass covered even for those that do not.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        You apparently haven't seen some of the SPAs that are in use out there... I can very validly consider an issue with losing even a minute vs 15 seconds being considered in favor of the latter. It might be nice if this was tunable via a setting though.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      what information would you lose exactly?
    - 10y ago
daveguy 10y ago
If you can get a petabyte of r/w out of an SSD then 12 GB/day (of writes only) will exhaust the device in 228 years (1 PB * 1000 TB/PB * 1000 GB/TB / 12 GB/Day / 365 Days/Year). If there is also an associated 12 GB/day of reads then half that estimate (unlikely to be equal due to the nature of the cache). Either way -- not a significant degradation. Edit: Degradation or not -- i'd personally rather have my drive resources available. In the context switch from firefox the cache process could interfere with loading other data.
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  Times of samsung 830 using 27nm SLC are over, its <1000 cycles 16nm TLC now. Drives that reach >1PB or write endurance are no longer on the consumer market. You can buy them (SLC), but you wont after seeing the price. You can do nice tests that will last for hundreds of TBs .. until you pause for 24 hours and realize all the data is gone.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    It was the 840 Pro that went 2.4 terabytes during a drive test that ended in 2015[0]. That was a 21nm tech. I think the endurance is better than you think. [0]http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
    - rasz_pl 10y ago
      afair this test was run 24/7 with no power down time. Earlier test (the one with 830? I think he moved computer mid test and had to power everything down) showed drives look healthy until you let them sit offline for a while, then it turns out all data evaporated. 840 is especially broken and dramatically slows down when you dont touch the data for >month. The "fix" is firmware silently rewriting everything in the background burning thru the rewrite cycles.
dekhn 10y ago
No, 12GB/day isn't going to make a dent.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Phlarp 10y ago
Anecdote; I have had one of the OG intel x-25 80GB MLC SSD drives and after 5+ years of usage first as a boot drive and now as a video editing scratch disk the wear leveling firmware has done an excellent job. Intel's monitoring software still claims the disk has 95% of it's write capacity remaining and I have not observed any changes to it's benchmark IO performance over the life of the drive.
- tracker1 10y ago
  You're lucky... mine died after the original 1 year warranty (a few days over, it detected as 10MB drive or some such), I replaced it before they had a fix for the issue... that said, every drive I've had since has been very solid, mostly using Samsung drives these days.
  - pja 10y ago
    The capacity error is fixable by using hdparm to secure erase the drive which as a side effect restores it’s original capacity. You still lose all your data though :(
  - cwillu 10y ago
    That has nothing to do with write endurance; it's a known bug in the firmware.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      I know that it's (now) a known bug... unfortunately it wasn't known when it happened to me, and I'd long since replaced it when I found out.
rayiner 10y ago
Some cheap drives (e.g. Crucial BX100) have an endurance rating of only about 40GB/day.
- gcp 10y ago
  So even with a cheap drive, if you leave your browser open with tons of tabs, and the PC on 24/7, it'll still easily handle it? Real lifetimes are often a multitude of the endurance rating, BTW.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    You're still using 1/4 of your write unendurable for your fricking web browser. And exceeding the endurance rating can make you ineligible for warranty service/replacement of the drive.
    - gcp 10y ago
      I dunno but I think plenty of people consider their web browser a pretty vital application.
      - sangnoir 10y ago
        > I dunno but I think plenty of people consider their web browser a pretty vital application. No one is arguing against that point. However, most people do not need their browser state to be needlessly backed-up that aggressively (every 15 seconds - which is about the same time it took me to type everything before this sentence). I'm OK with losing up to 20 minutes of my state in a browser. Most work done in a browser is usually synced to an upstream browser every few minutes - auto saved emails or multi-step web-apps.
        tracker1 10y ago
        And when you just spent 10 minutes finding the link you need, and your browser crashes, you're going to spend a lot more time again. There are plenty of cases where I'm really glad my browser re-opens all the tabs, with cookies in play etc. If your job includes having to use a web application for significant portions of said job, it's even more invaluable. I've worked on several applications that account for more than 40% of some employees' time per day... This was back in the IE6 days, they bemoaned having to close/reopen once a day because of memory issues (IE6 had horrible GC across COM boundaries).
mohdmasd 10y ago
Also, does this affect hybrid disks?
- tracker1 10y ago
  Hybrid disks are likely a much bigger issue, given the really small amount of SSD space and its' use as scratch cache.

Serious question: Is 12GB a day really going to make a dent in your SSD's lifespan? I was under the impression that, with modern SSDs, you basically didn't have to worry about this stuff.

gcp 10y ago

Samsung's low cost line is under warranty up to 40TB/year. Tests have shown that the actual drive lifetime is several times that. So basically, no, you don't have to worry about this. Essentially, people are complaining that the disks they bought are being used for their intended purpose: making sure your data doesn't disappear on a power loss.

dogma1138 10y ago
Not everyone buys Samsung, there are a lot of cheap SSD's out there that are rated for only a handful of TB's a year. There is also a case of the silly SSHD's or w/e which combine a tiny SSD and a mechanical component which can die considerably faster. Overall the amount of writes an SSD can handle is tied directly to it's capacity since it determines the amount of average writes per a given time unit that each cell will experience as long as the firmware actually does it's job (in Samsung's case it may very well not do it as they had more than a few firmware screw ups in the past). This can also more severely affect you if you have a medium sized drive (say 128-256GB) but it's pretty full. A good SSD's will move things around somewhat to even out the wear but it still increases the amount of writes you have. If your SSD does have an "even wear" feature when you write 12GB to drive which is say 50% or more full it usually triggers more than 12GB of effective writes in the drive itself as the firmware would move already written data around to ensure that every cell has been written to approximately the same amount (if you say only have 20GB of free space and you write 12GB daily and delete it, your effective writes would be closer to the full capacity of the drive per day than to 12GB). You also have a lot of embedded/mobile devices which use considerably shittier storage than modern SSD's, you can easily chew through a SD card or a similarly rated flash storage with anywhere between a few 100's of gigs to only a handful of TB's (or a only few times the capacity of the card if buy bargain bin memory cards). Since these machines are more commonly used these days it's not a feature that should be so quickly obfuscated from the user since it doesn't seem like there is an "intelligence" behind how conservative or not the browser is with writes to local storage. If you install firefox on an SBC/netbook/microcomputer or even a mobile phone (if this affects the mobile version also) with eMMC/MMC only rated storage 12 gigs a day can and will kill it rather quickly.
- pawadu 10y ago
  this was a very insightful comment, thank you!
- dsr_ 10y ago
  Android Firefox has this set to 10 seconds, rather than the 15 on a desktop.
  - creshal 10y ago
    And Pale Moon (Firefox fork) to 60.
    - gcp 10y ago
      Firefox's session restore code was recently rewritten. Given that Pale Moon is based on an outdated fork, it's not clear the behavior is comparable, or that the setting means the same.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Android suspends backgrounded applications, and will kill them at will, so that actually makes a lot of sense: you have less risk of data loss, and the write issue doesn't exist unless you leave the browser in the foreground 24/7 (and the phone unlocked with the screen on etc).
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    I don't know what this translates too for a mobile device, I don't know if it stores the same data, and how does the fact that mobile sites tend to be light affects it. Other things like add ons, amount of tabs open and etc. could also affect it. Would be interesting to see if some one has SBC's with either SD or onboard eMMC rated storage to run this test and see how much is being written too and calculate just how much of the lifespan of the storage is being reduced due to this. IIRC even the iPhone 6s still uses TLC flash for it's storage, TLC is only good for about 500-1000 P/E cycles, so it needs pretty good capacity overhead and well "TLC" to live long. In comparison SLC gets you over 100K P/E cycles these days, MLC can get to over 30K. Also if anyone knows if mobile phones do wear leveling for their eMMC/MMC storage I would love to know that ;)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nathanaldensr 10y ago
No, "people" are not complaining about that; it's a fine attempt at a straw man, though. What the article complains about through implication is that Firefox is unnecessarily writing too much data to disk.
- gcp 10y ago
  Why would it be unnecessary? The amount of data follows rather logically from the amount of website state it's capturing, and the interval seems totally like personal preference to me. Would you rather lose 60 seconds of work or 15? Uh, I'll take less data loss.
  - pixl97 10y ago
    In a web browser? You're acting like the browser is a major local storage application (like excel for example), almost everything I'm going to be working on is an online application, and it takes care of storing my data on the server infrastructure. So yea, 15 seconds or 60 seconds isn't going to be a major 'data loss' issue either way.
    - gcp 10y ago
      it takes care of storing my data on the server infrastructure Do you manually hit the save button every 15 seconds? Some webapps do this for you. Some do not. Firefox has got your ass covered even for those that do not.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      You apparently haven't seen some of the SPAs that are in use out there... I can very validly consider an issue with losing even a minute vs 15 seconds being considered in favor of the latter. It might be nice if this was tunable via a setting though.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    what information would you lose exactly?
  - 10y ago

daveguy 10y ago

If you can get a petabyte of r/w out of an SSD then 12 GB/day (of writes only) will exhaust the device in 228 years (1 PB * 1000 TB/PB * 1000 GB/TB / 12 GB/Day / 365 Days/Year). If there is also an associated 12 GB/day of reads then half that estimate (unlikely to be equal due to the nature of the cache). Either way -- not a significant degradation. Edit: Degradation or not -- i'd personally rather have my drive resources available. In the context switch from firefox the cache process could interfere with loading other data.

rasz_pl 10y ago
Times of samsung 830 using 27nm SLC are over, its <1000 cycles 16nm TLC now. Drives that reach >1PB or write endurance are no longer on the consumer market. You can buy them (SLC), but you wont after seeing the price. You can do nice tests that will last for hundreds of TBs .. until you pause for 24 hours and realize all the data is gone.
- daveguy 10y ago
  It was the 840 Pro that went 2.4 terabytes during a drive test that ended in 2015[0]. That was a 21nm tech. I think the endurance is better than you think. [0]http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    afair this test was run 24/7 with no power down time. Earlier test (the one with 830? I think he moved computer mid test and had to power everything down) showed drives look healthy until you let them sit offline for a while, then it turns out all data evaporated. 840 is especially broken and dramatically slows down when you dont touch the data for >month. The "fix" is firmware silently rewriting everything in the background burning thru the rewrite cycles.

dekhn 10y ago

No, 12GB/day isn't going to make a dent.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Phlarp 10y ago

Anecdote; I have had one of the OG intel x-25 80GB MLC SSD drives and after 5+ years of usage first as a boot drive and now as a video editing scratch disk the wear leveling firmware has done an excellent job. Intel's monitoring software still claims the disk has 95% of it's write capacity remaining and I have not observed any changes to it's benchmark IO performance over the life of the drive.

tracker1 10y ago
You're lucky... mine died after the original 1 year warranty (a few days over, it detected as 10MB drive or some such), I replaced it before they had a fix for the issue... that said, every drive I've had since has been very solid, mostly using Samsung drives these days.
- pja 10y ago
  The capacity error is fixable by using hdparm to secure erase the drive which as a side effect restores it’s original capacity. You still lose all your data though :(
- cwillu 10y ago
  That has nothing to do with write endurance; it's a known bug in the firmware.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I know that it's (now) a known bug... unfortunately it wasn't known when it happened to me, and I'd long since replaced it when I found out.

rayiner 10y ago

Some cheap drives (e.g. Crucial BX100) have an endurance rating of only about 40GB/day.

gcp 10y ago
So even with a cheap drive, if you leave your browser open with tons of tabs, and the PC on 24/7, it'll still easily handle it? Real lifetimes are often a multitude of the endurance rating, BTW.
- rayiner 10y ago
  You're still using 1/4 of your write unendurable for your fricking web browser. And exceeding the endurance rating can make you ineligible for warranty service/replacement of the drive.
  - gcp 10y ago
    I dunno but I think plenty of people consider their web browser a pretty vital application.
    - sangnoir 10y ago
      > I dunno but I think plenty of people consider their web browser a pretty vital application. No one is arguing against that point. However, most people do not need their browser state to be needlessly backed-up that aggressively (every 15 seconds - which is about the same time it took me to type everything before this sentence). I'm OK with losing up to 20 minutes of my state in a browser. Most work done in a browser is usually synced to an upstream browser every few minutes - auto saved emails or multi-step web-apps.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        And when you just spent 10 minutes finding the link you need, and your browser crashes, you're going to spend a lot more time again. There are plenty of cases where I'm really glad my browser re-opens all the tabs, with cookies in play etc. If your job includes having to use a web application for significant portions of said job, it's even more invaluable. I've worked on several applications that account for more than 40% of some employees' time per day... This was back in the IE6 days, they bemoaned having to close/reopen once a day because of memory issues (IE6 had horrible GC across COM boundaries).

mohdmasd 10y ago

Also, does this affect hybrid disks?

tracker1 10y ago
Hybrid disks are likely a much bigger issue, given the really small amount of SSD space and its' use as scratch cache.