4 ms·

The real problem is OS:es that write to disk for no good reason. Windows 10 writes 100KB/s constantly. That should be illegal.

• walterbell 4y ago
  Do we know the location of those writes, perhaps they can be redirected to a ramdisk?
  • paranoidrobot 4y ago
    Sysinternals tools will show up the writes and what is causing them. I've dug down and found random things doing dumb stuff in the past. Verbose logging turned on by default for some services, for example.
  • rasz 4y ago
    management/windows logs about >100 active logs. Performance/data collector set about >50 active Event Trace Sessions running.
• rogers18445 4y ago
  This doesn't actually matter in a practical sense. Assuming 24/7, it's 3TB a year. Which is ~1% drive endurance. Also, if you are worried about overwriting the same files over and over, it also doesn't matter. Block device addresses are not physical addresses, controller maps them to wear the drive evenly.
  • matja 4y ago
    Except "evenly" is not a standard, or something that anyone other than the manufacturer can verify, it's hidden in the firmware so we have no idea really.
  • wtallis 4y ago
    On the other hand, lots of tiny writes scattered all over will tend to produce much higher write amplification than large sequential writes. So you'll get more actual wear to the drive from the 3TB of constant background churn than if you copied in 3TB of movies.
    • rogers18445 4y ago
      Those writes would have to be significantly smaller than the SSD's page (sector) size which is 512 bytes or 4 KiB. And would have to be written to different pages in rapid succession (to be flushed apart) - a standard serial write wouldn't trigger this even if it's 1 byte at a time, the OS FS cache would buffer it. It would have to be very misbehaving software or deliberate sabotage.
      • vlovich123 4y ago
        I’m pretty sure SSDs can only do 4kib aligned writes regardless of the FS sector size (under the hood it’s a write amplification unless the OS or controller manage to coalesce them. But yea, it depends on how things are getting flushed, but generally I wouldn’t expect too much magic unless you get lucky. It sounds like a small bug in the OS (ie these kinds of wires should be matched in memory in the application).
        • rogers18445 4y ago
          I do wonder if perhaps the good NVME SSD controllers come with magic. It would take a single instance of malware ruining SSD's with 4000x write amplification to taint some brands while aiding the marketing of others.
        • donmcronald 4y ago
          I thought some of them even do 8KB. I’ve seen ZFS tips that claim you should use 8KB blocks on things like an 850 Pro.
          • vlovich123 4y ago
            Not familiar with that. I know QLC disks have a block size of 64kib.
        • wtallis 4y ago
          Almost all SSDs internally track allocations in a 4kB granularity. That size is what leads to the convention of equipping the drive with 1GB of DRAM for every 1TB of NAND flash, when the drive is designed to hold the entire table of logical to physical address mappings in DRAM. It's now common for consumer SSDs to have less DRAM than the normal 1GB per 1TB ratio, but they run their FTL with the same 4kB granularity and just don't have the full lookup table in RAM. There are at least a handful of special-purpose enterprise drives that use a larger sector size in their FTL, such as the 32kB used by WD's SN340: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14723 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14723
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• jandrese 4y ago
  Try running Windows 10 off of an older spinning laptop drive. It can take upwards of 40 minutes to display the desktop on the first boot after Windows Update runs. Even in normal operation those constant low level writes leave barely any breathing room for your actual applications. Full size hard drives do a bit better, but even then it can be pretty painful when the drive indexing service kicks off or .NET is updated.
  • donmcronald 4y ago
    Windows 10 on an SSD feels like Windows 7 on a spinning disk. Microsoft has wiped out the gains we got from SSDs.
• hrez 4y ago
  browsers are much worse, both chrome based and firefox