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Ask HN: Is there a website that tracks excessive writes to SSDs in OS/app betas?
If not, why not?
That way, people can choose whether they want to install various software betas based on how much SSD wear they are willing to accept.
And since this data would be made public and available in one place, software developers would be more careful about excessive logging in their betas.
- CharlesW 3mo ago> If not, why not? At least on Apple devices, this is not something anyone has to worry about. For example, on my 2022 Mac Studio daily driver, on 24/7, DriveDx (https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx) reports my SSD lifetime left at 94%. (I'm aware of the February 2021 "wear-gate" scare involving the first M1 Macs. This turned to be incorrect SSD-wear reporting.)
- amichail 3mo agoWhat about people who want their laptop to last 10 years?
- JohnFen 3mo agoYou can replace your SSD without replacing your laptop.
- amichail 3mo agoOn some laptops, it requires a complete motherboard replacement.
- JohnFen 3mo agoReally?? I would consider such laptops not fit for purpose and wouldn't buy one in the first place. Of course, that doesn't help if that's the sort you have. Sorry.
- amichail 3mo agoMacBooks are like that.
- justsomehnguy 3mo agoI have a feeling you missed a giant "/s". Or maybe not, can't be sure nowadays.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 3mo agoWell, then I wouldn't buy a MacBook. Regardless, if you're concerned about the logging of beta software prematurely wearing out your SSD, then don't use beta software. It's not ready for release anyway, by definition. It's there so you can help test it for the developers. Logging is an important part of that.
- bot403 3mo agoIt helps reduce size and weight since you can just directly place ssd chips on the motherboard instead of planning for connectors. Just depends on what your priorities are.
- waffletower 3mo agoI think people have forgotten what year it is and how ubiquitous SoC and unified memory designs have become.
- justthehuman 3mo agoThen you probably want something that has replaceable parts and not an apple product (e.g. framework)? Not trying to discourage you from building your thing, but just figure that's worth considering. Also, I could see why developers would want excessive logging in their betas, so that's kind of a catch-22 (without the verbose logs it might be harder to fix bugs found in the beta)
- baal80spam 3mo agoWell if 4 years decrease SSD life by 6%, then 10 years should decrease it by ~15% - so you have plenty of wiggling space.
- ValentineC 3mo agoFor Macs, treat a renewable AppleCare subscription as part of the cost.
- esseph 3mo agoThen you probably want enterprise level drives, motherboard, ECC RAM, etc.
- justthehuman 3mo agoI know I do! Last time I looked at Laptops that supported ECC it was a very short and very expensive list. At least I could get enterprise datacenter SSDs... once upon a time... I know that I DONT want iLO/IPMI/Redfish on a laptop though, the out of band stuff eats up a ton of power.
- radicality 3mo agoOn my personal computers I keep track of this and ensure nothing goes write-crazy. On my work laptop though (M3 Pro, 1TB), I’m at ~70% health. Iirc the lifetime writes are at >700TB. I do develop on it, but a lot of it is due to the various endpoint security software that’s always there logging every single possible thing but I can’t do much about it. I expect the ssd to die first in this laptop at this rate, so best I can do is ensure everything always synced/backed up from my local work laptop.
- yellow_lead 3mo agoWith some badly written apps like Codex though, this may be a concern [1]. [1] https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28224 https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28224
- neya 3mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 3mo agoPlease don't act like a jerk on HN. There are articles and comments criticizing Apple all the time and it's fine.
- neya 3mo agoYou of all the people should and would know that the slightest criticism of Apple is rejected here, not based by merit of the argument, but for simply endorsing the viewpoint that Apple can be evil too. I'm sure mods have tools and stats to see all this and you probably see it too, but you be you.
- justsomehnguy 3mo agoIf you are not using bottom of a barrel and you are not writing 4K HD 3H mkv every day then you wouldn't have a problem even with a 0.3 DPWD drive of a sufficient capacity.
- KomoD 3mo ago> 0.3 DPWD What does this mean?
- justsomehnguy 3mo agoDrive Write Per Day (typo in my previous comment) From the horse mouth: https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/servers-and-data-centers/understanding-ssd-endurance-tbw-dwpd https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/servers-and-data-centers/un... 0.3 DWPD is for the cheapest ones but even for them you would never exhaust the flash resource in a common home usage. To give you an idea: a 120GB drive with 0.3 DWPD "allows" you to rewrite 120 x 0.3 = 40GBytes a day for 3 years straigth, which is 280GB/week or 1200GB/month. for a 1TB drive it would be 300GB/day, 2100GB/week, 9000GB/month.
- tosti 3mo agoJust configure wear leveling in your storage layer. FDE may be the easiest way ti do it. Writes will be done linearly in circular fashion. That makes it difficult to delete stuff, but with encryption it's moot.
- markhahn 3mo agodevices already do wear management. at most, you should configure your system and OS to give them a chance. for instance, being 100% full all the time is just bad. use TRIM and log SMART metrics.
- markhahn 3mo agowhy do you think this is a function of betas? or even of OS or app versions? I guess you've been burned, or are worried about being burned, by some software that generated excessive writes? I think you need to describe that first, since this is a rare phenomenon. which is probably why there isn't some kind of downdetector infra tracking it. you know you can access smart counters on any OS, right?
- embedding-shape 3mo agoI feel like the only responsible thing is to have a home network with at least one persistent device running 24/7 with large storage for local backups of things, and ideally a E2E cloud backup of the same thing. With this, comes the possibility of using things like Grafana+Prometheus to monitor your personal computer/workstation as well. This is what I've done, together with alerts from various things, and since the recent "excessive writes by codex" issue, also alerts if there is obsessive writing over hours long period from any process on my workstation. Luckily I wasn't hit by the Codex issue myself, but certainly made me consider the issue more generally so, happy accidents :)