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> However a nice SSD with a respectable TBW value is not still cheap. a 860 Pro is almost twice the cost of a 860 Evo. Pro provides twice the TBW value. TBW is

by piaste 6y ago

> However a nice SSD with a respectable TBW value is not still cheap. a 860 Pro is almost twice the cost of a 860 Evo. Pro provides twice the TBW value. TBW is almost never a concern for desktop users. The Evo has 600 TBW endurance per TB of storage, that would be a full disk rewrite every day for two years. You will never download enough Docker images for personal use to burn out your 860 Evo before you would have replaced it anyway. (For those unfamiliar with Docker, spinning up a 500MB image ten times doesn't write 5GB to disk!)

bayindirh 6y ago
> TBW is almost never a concern for desktop users. You're right however, most of the people who'll use this kind of setup is not ordinary desktop users. My desktop has 4 disks (2 SSDs and 2 HDDs). My write rate for "Home" SSD is 3TB/yr. To keep the value low, I've moved VMs, big downloads and other stuff to one of the HDDs. System is on another SSD and it's cumulative write was about 3TB in 8 years but, I moved logs and high-write portions to another HDD to keep that value low. 3-4TB / year on the other hand is pretty in line with a Windows 10 installation's behavior when used by a normal desktop user, as intended. >You will never download enough Docker images for personal use to burn out your 860 Evo before you would have replaced it anyway. Considering other stuff I do, I could easily double or triple the amount of writes in my Home SSD, but VMs and other stuff already can sit on the RAM once running so there's no speed problem. While write amplification is not a big concern anymore, building software and other small file operations can accumulate fast, so I still can't trust a SSD blindly. On the replacing of drives, while a dd or rsync is pretty straightforward for a seasoned Linux user, I don't prefer to change hardware just for the sake of it, or abuse it because it's cheap and can be replaced on a whim. At the end of the day, I'd rather use my system efficiently rather than recklessly both in terms of resources and endurance, because being able to rely on your system is underrated imho. Because of my Job, we torture systems up to and beyond their design limits and a little optimization can go a long way in these scenarios. I like to apply that knowledge to my systems to extend their useful life.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  So, are these the numbers? TBW is 600 TB, but you do 3TB/year across four disks, and I'll be generous and say you do .75/SSD/year. so in 750 years you'll hit the rated TBW? If you did a full 3TB/year on the one SSD, you hit it in 200 years?
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    No, 600TBW is for a 1TB Evo. For a Pro, it would be 1.200TBW. Unfortunately, neither of my disks are that big. Home is on a 256GB SSD which boils down to 300TBW. System SSD is a bit older 120GB OCz Vertex 3. This model doesn't have a TBW rating. As a result, if I don't do anything heavy, it'd last for a century in the best case. I'm not sure about OCz though. It reports 100% life remaining but it's from the skunkworks era of the SSDs so, I can't be sure for anything. The numbers climb very fast when you start to develop stuff and enter compile -> test -> debug cycle. So, I'd rather have that endurance and use it while developing software rather than eating it while doing daily stuff.
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      You mean that era right after when Intel released the first consumer SSD, and suddenly everyone was rebadging flash with who-knows-what controllers? Anandtech was the best site for that era with their testing.
      - bayindirh 6y ago
        Almost, but not quite. The Vertex 3 was one of the best SSDs at that time. Had one of the better Sandforce controllers with proper MLC flash but, had to write compressible data to obtain these speeds. It has no temperature sensor so it cannot compensate for temperature or understand its environment. It doesn't have a TBW rating (IIRC) and reports writes and reads in GiB. So it's somewhat limited when compared to today's drives. OTOH, it's pretty dependable and stable so far. [0]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-120gb https://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-...

by piaste 6y ago

bayindirh 6y ago

> TBW is almost never a concern for desktop users. You're right however, most of the people who'll use this kind of setup is not ordinary desktop users. My desktop has 4 disks (2 SSDs and 2 HDDs). My write rate for "Home" SSD is 3TB/yr. To keep the value low, I've moved VMs, big downloads and other stuff to one of the HDDs. System is on another SSD and it's cumulative write was about 3TB in 8 years but, I moved logs and high-write portions to another HDD to keep that value low. 3-4TB / year on the other hand is pretty in line with a Windows 10 installation's behavior when used by a normal desktop user, as intended. >You will never download enough Docker images for personal use to burn out your 860 Evo before you would have replaced it anyway. Considering other stuff I do, I could easily double or triple the amount of writes in my Home SSD, but VMs and other stuff already can sit on the RAM once running so there's no speed problem. While write amplification is not a big concern anymore, building software and other small file operations can accumulate fast, so I still can't trust a SSD blindly. On the replacing of drives, while a dd or rsync is pretty straightforward for a seasoned Linux user, I don't prefer to change hardware just for the sake of it, or abuse it because it's cheap and can be replaced on a whim. At the end of the day, I'd rather use my system efficiently rather than recklessly both in terms of resources and endurance, because being able to rely on your system is underrated imho. Because of my Job, we torture systems up to and beyond their design limits and a little optimization can go a long way in these scenarios. I like to apply that knowledge to my systems to extend their useful life.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
So, are these the numbers? TBW is 600 TB, but you do 3TB/year across four disks, and I'll be generous and say you do .75/SSD/year. so in 750 years you'll hit the rated TBW? If you did a full 3TB/year on the one SSD, you hit it in 200 years?
- bayindirh 6y ago
  No, 600TBW is for a 1TB Evo. For a Pro, it would be 1.200TBW. Unfortunately, neither of my disks are that big. Home is on a 256GB SSD which boils down to 300TBW. System SSD is a bit older 120GB OCz Vertex 3. This model doesn't have a TBW rating. As a result, if I don't do anything heavy, it'd last for a century in the best case. I'm not sure about OCz though. It reports 100% life remaining but it's from the skunkworks era of the SSDs so, I can't be sure for anything. The numbers climb very fast when you start to develop stuff and enter compile -> test -> debug cycle. So, I'd rather have that endurance and use it while developing software rather than eating it while doing daily stuff.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    You mean that era right after when Intel released the first consumer SSD, and suddenly everyone was rebadging flash with who-knows-what controllers? Anandtech was the best site for that era with their testing.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      Almost, but not quite. The Vertex 3 was one of the best SSDs at that time. Had one of the better Sandforce controllers with proper MLC flash but, had to write compressible data to obtain these speeds. It has no temperature sensor so it cannot compensate for temperature or understand its environment. It doesn't have a TBW rating (IIRC) and reports writes and reads in GiB. So it's somewhat limited when compared to today's drives. OTOH, it's pretty dependable and stable so far. [0]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-120gb https://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-...