4 ms·

Silly question, do we have to worry about older PC OSes not playing well with SSDs with excessive read/writes? I'd be concerned about destroying drives in shor

Silly question, do we have to worry about older PC OSes not playing well with SSDs with excessive read/writes? I'd be concerned about destroying drives in short order with swaps that are miss behaving.

londons_explore 4y ago
Older software tends to do far less 'background' stuff. Whenever I run old OS's in virtualbox, I'm surprised that even doing lots of stuff for a week rarely results in more than a few GB's of writes. So I don't think your concern is an issue for the typical case in practice. Obviously there'll be corner cases, but I haven't hit those yet.
willcipriano 4y ago
You really have to go nuts with the writes to break a modern SSD. I don't think the bandwidth is even high enough to do so on purpose on a older machine.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Repeated defrag runs could wear some grooves into those bits. Older versions of Windows will not look for (nor care about) the "rotational" flag.
  - pkaye 4y ago
    Disable defrag
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      I don't want to, watching the mishmash of rectangles slowly getting organized by color makes me feel very productive!
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    Only Vista has automatically-scheduled background full defragmentation and doesn't care about the rotational flag.
    - metalliqaz 4y ago
      Then we're good, because nobody is going to install that friggin OS
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Automatic defrag should only hit a handful of files each time it runs. You're not going to upset an SSD with that. But even a whole-disk rewrite cycle will have very limited effect on the vast majority of SSDs.
- bob1029 4y ago
  I was astonished at the remaining life on a Samsung 960 pro when I checked the other day. I don't think I will have to replace it this decade at the current pace.
  - nubinetwork 4y ago
    I have a pair of crucial mx500 ssds that are down to their last 10% of reported life... Awaiting the day they finally decide to stop working, maybe some time during the summer...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
amir 4y ago
Lack of OS-level TRIM support will slow down writes. TRIM also allows SSDs to maintain wear leveling.
- anthk 4y ago
  Today the SSD microcontroller will do TRIM by itself.
  - xmodem 4y ago
    Do you mean that it will automatically TRIM a block of all zeros? Or that it will itself try to parse filesystem structures and TRIM blocks that it can imply are un-used?
  - rasz 4y ago
    Can you list even one drive that internally parses filesystem data and guesses empty space to trim?
- kalleboo 4y ago
  The trick I've heard to use SSDs on devices without TRIM is to just leave like 15% of the drive unprovisioned (i.e. create a single partition smaller than the drive) to give the drive's built-in garbage collection plenty of slack space to work with. If you're working with vintage machines they all have drive size limits in the 2-8 GB range anyway so you'll end up doing that anyway as you can't get SSDs that small
  - superkuh 4y ago
    You can't just leave the space unprovisioned in general. It's a crapshoot weather the drive will automatically over-provision using the unprovisioned space. I've never personally seen one that does this. With samsung, crucial, and other major brands you need to use their proprietary tools to change the over-provisioning percentage (before doing any formatting/creating partition table). So, to anyone else trying this, make sure to do it before you create the partition table.
IE6 4y ago
Completely anecdotal observation with n=1 but FWIW I was an early adopter of SSDs and put one in my thinkpad in college running Win XP (this was before trim and all that) - it did require my to "align the partitions" but once that was done I did all my project work and would routinely hybernate my laptop. It lasted all through college and years after. I eventually just retired the device. SDD was fine. At the time SSDs were "unusable" for desktop workloads because of their perceived failure rates.
- kiririn 4y ago
  Whether or not they were rated for it, SSDs of that era were capable of vastly more writes than today’s SSDs
- rasz 4y ago
  Early SSDs were all SLC with 50-100K erase cycles. Current cheap flash is around 200-500 cycles.
  - IE6 4y ago
    I was a college student so I couldn't afford one of those - I had a 100 GB SATA MLC SSD that read at like 100 MB/s - this was ~2007ish when SSD were still new from a consumer perspective.
johnklos 4y ago
Yes, we do have to worry about excessive writes. I had a Samsung SSD - chosen because Samsung flash storage is generally better than most - connected to a SATA to IDE adapter, which was connected to an IDE to SCSI adapter, installed in a VAXStation 4000/30 (AKA the VAXStation VLC). It has 24 megs of memory. https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/1294725819038752768 https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/12947258190387527... In less than a year, the SSD was dead, and I'm sure the reason was that I was compiling constantly on that machine, so writes to swap were constant. I now have a spinning rust 500 gig SATA drive, and it has been fine for the last three years without problems.

londons_explore 4y ago

Older software tends to do far less 'background' stuff. Whenever I run old OS's in virtualbox, I'm surprised that even doing lots of stuff for a week rarely results in more than a few GB's of writes. So I don't think your concern is an issue for the typical case in practice. Obviously there'll be corner cases, but I haven't hit those yet.

willcipriano 4y ago

You really have to go nuts with the writes to break a modern SSD. I don't think the bandwidth is even high enough to do so on purpose on a older machine.

rzzzt 4y ago
Repeated defrag runs could wear some grooves into those bits. Older versions of Windows will not look for (nor care about) the "rotational" flag.
- pkaye 4y ago
  Disable defrag
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    I don't want to, watching the mishmash of rectangles slowly getting organized by color makes me feel very productive!
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  Only Vista has automatically-scheduled background full defragmentation and doesn't care about the rotational flag.
  - metalliqaz 4y ago
    Then we're good, because nobody is going to install that friggin OS
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Automatic defrag should only hit a handful of files each time it runs. You're not going to upset an SSD with that. But even a whole-disk rewrite cycle will have very limited effect on the vast majority of SSDs.
bob1029 4y ago
I was astonished at the remaining life on a Samsung 960 pro when I checked the other day. I don't think I will have to replace it this decade at the current pace.
- nubinetwork 4y ago
  I have a pair of crucial mx500 ssds that are down to their last 10% of reported life... Awaiting the day they finally decide to stop working, maybe some time during the summer...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

amir 4y ago

Lack of OS-level TRIM support will slow down writes. TRIM also allows SSDs to maintain wear leveling.

anthk 4y ago
Today the SSD microcontroller will do TRIM by itself.
- xmodem 4y ago
  Do you mean that it will automatically TRIM a block of all zeros? Or that it will itself try to parse filesystem structures and TRIM blocks that it can imply are un-used?
- rasz 4y ago
  Can you list even one drive that internally parses filesystem data and guesses empty space to trim?
kalleboo 4y ago
The trick I've heard to use SSDs on devices without TRIM is to just leave like 15% of the drive unprovisioned (i.e. create a single partition smaller than the drive) to give the drive's built-in garbage collection plenty of slack space to work with. If you're working with vintage machines they all have drive size limits in the 2-8 GB range anyway so you'll end up doing that anyway as you can't get SSDs that small
- superkuh 4y ago
  You can't just leave the space unprovisioned in general. It's a crapshoot weather the drive will automatically over-provision using the unprovisioned space. I've never personally seen one that does this. With samsung, crucial, and other major brands you need to use their proprietary tools to change the over-provisioning percentage (before doing any formatting/creating partition table). So, to anyone else trying this, make sure to do it before you create the partition table.

IE6 4y ago

Completely anecdotal observation with n=1 but FWIW I was an early adopter of SSDs and put one in my thinkpad in college running Win XP (this was before trim and all that) - it did require my to "align the partitions" but once that was done I did all my project work and would routinely hybernate my laptop. It lasted all through college and years after. I eventually just retired the device. SDD was fine. At the time SSDs were "unusable" for desktop workloads because of their perceived failure rates.

kiririn 4y ago
Whether or not they were rated for it, SSDs of that era were capable of vastly more writes than today’s SSDs
rasz 4y ago
Early SSDs were all SLC with 50-100K erase cycles. Current cheap flash is around 200-500 cycles.
- IE6 4y ago
  I was a college student so I couldn't afford one of those - I had a 100 GB SATA MLC SSD that read at like 100 MB/s - this was ~2007ish when SSD were still new from a consumer perspective.

johnklos 4y ago

Yes, we do have to worry about excessive writes. I had a Samsung SSD - chosen because Samsung flash storage is generally better than most - connected to a SATA to IDE adapter, which was connected to an IDE to SCSI adapter, installed in a VAXStation 4000/30 (AKA the VAXStation VLC). It has 24 megs of memory. https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/1294725819038752768 https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/12947258190387527... In less than a year, the SSD was dead, and I'm sure the reason was that I was compiling constantly on that machine, so writes to swap were constant. I now have a spinning rust 500 gig SATA drive, and it has been fine for the last three years without problems.