SSD on RAID card - IDE mode?

[Salmon Trout]

Regarding the "Approx SSD life" time given by SSDReady, I presume this is a number of hours expressed in years/months/weeks? Since I don't have the PC on 24/7, but only about 55 hours each week, that, if I took this sort of thing seriously, (which I don't) I could apply a factor of 168/55 to the "6.2 years" it is optimistically suggesting...

[DaveLembke]

Tried out that SSDReady utility and before I went to bed at about 1.5 hrs of it monitoring while gaming it said 8.4 years. Woke up and looked back at it and it now says 46 years...LOL   I guess its a monitoring utility that you want to start and stop during the active part of the computer operation day. 



[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[Salmon Trout]

I had it running while I was doing a speed benchmark, and during the "sequential write" test, it gave the expected SSD life as "0.79 months". I get the feeling that apps like this can be a trap for people with OCD tendencies. I can remember a "RAM monitor" that I once had in the taskbar, and it took a conscious effort of will to uninstall the *censored* thing. The notes say to run it for a week - well, my PC is never on for that long.

[Salmon Trout]

Dave, I was wondering how you got your daily write figure down to such a small amount; mine was hovering around 15 GB a day. Earlier on I shifted my Firefox profile folder off the SSD and switched its cache to RAM and went away to have a meal. Now I have come back and the figure is 6.5 GB and heading downwards, and the "approximate life" time is now over 11 years.

I guess the app may have some use - a daily use figure may be a useful thing to know, I have seen figures of 10-20 GB mentioned as typical, and AnandTech says "It's unlikely for a light consumer workload to see more than 10GiB of writes per day". It says at this level a 128 GB device using MLC NAND technology ought to last 10 years running all the time. Well, mine runs about 33% of the time.

[Calum]

Personally I would be inclined to ignore those figures and just use your SSD
It's incredibly unlikely that under any normal workload you would wear out your NAND before another kind of failure.  That's not to say that e.g. SSD controller failures are incredibly common (they are on some models but not in general) but rather that wearing out the flash is pretty difficult unless you have an early SSD where the NAND isn't up to much, you buy a used and abused SSD, or you put it under a non-standard write heavy workload.

[DaveLembke]

Dave, I was wondering how you got your daily write figure down to such a small amount; mine was hovering around 15 GB a day.

Low figure is likely because I have SSD and HDD and the HDD actually does the read/write grunt work while the SSD is used mainly to make the OS boot fast and programs that are mainly read-only in nature are on the SSD to use it for its speed advantage. I have temp files, personal data storage, download path, 6GB swap space, and the games all on the HDD or pointing to the HDD. * So pretty much the SSD is used to make the OS and Firefox load fast as well as some other small programs installed to it or are otherwise programs without the option for custom alt installation path etc.

Initially this program selected both the SSD and HDD and it did not know the difference between them and the numbers were much larger. I then stopped it and deselected the F: HDD drive and cleared and started it again and then gamed for about 1.5 hrs and then slept for about 6 hrs and then woke up to the 46 year figure..lol

With it monitoring the HDD it was telling me 2.7 years when gaming, then switched to C: (SSD) only and it said 8.4 years, so the HDD activity was skewing the calculations. Will try this again tonight out of curiosity when the system is active and stop running it when the system is going to be in extended idle to see what it shows.

This system btw is running the Corsair Force F40 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233130 ... not a bad SSD for $35 USD on a newegg closeout. Have been running it about 6 months now. This drives S.M.A.R.T data actually keeps track of total qty of data read/written to this drive on top of operating hours and power cycles since factory initialized.

[Salmon Trout]

After I moved the Firefox cache off the SSD it now says the disk should last 58 years, which is comforting.