LebGeeks

VincentKeyboard

Member

ssd health 99.0% remaining

After ~6 months, my ssh health suddenly dropped from 100% to 99.0% according to hwinfo.

1) What was it not gradual?
2) I presume even 1% per month is not "bad" as it means a 100 months. But what exactly does this mean? Did I just lose 1% of the storage capacity?

nuclearcat

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

After ~6 months, my ssh health suddenly dropped from 100% to 99.0% according to hwinfo.

1) What was it not gradual?
2) I presume even 1% per month is not "bad" as it means a 100 months. But what exaclty does this mean? Did I just lose 1% of the storage capacity?

Approx meaning: possible write cycles count.
https://www.ontrack.com/blog/2016/10/25/wear-leveling/

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Oh. I see. That explains a lot. Thank you for the link.

rolf

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Your SSD resale value just dropped.

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

What happens when the number reaches 0?

nuclearcat

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

In best case it will become read only. In worst - you will lose all data on it.
I suggest to not reach lower than 15%, experienced earlier failures on some extreme case usage (but more likely due too high DWPD).

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

I just saw the prices. pcandparts are selling the 1TB Intel nvme for 139 USD. I presume that one has quite a bit more write cycles?

nuclearcat

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Not necessary. Newer SSD mostly TLC and have _less_ cycles, if we talk write per cell. But because capacity higher, amount of TB you can write per day and per lifetime is higher.
Check this: https://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/every … .html#eMLC

anayman_k7

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

I am currently using 1TB Intel 660p Nvme SSD which is based on TLC, I watched once a video about the longevity of this drive and as far as I remember it needs like 40 years to die based on write cycles and an average write values from users, but I am sure it will die much more earlier than this, hopefully it will give me signs that it is going to die so I can backup stuff, based on my experience the main sign is freezing with high disk percentage usage while reading/writing a very low amount of MBs per second

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

This is partially Window's fault. It takes me three years to write 15TB on a hdd on Linux.
Windows, however, won't keep the disk activity down.
Even at idle, the System process, To-Do, and Skype are doing a combined 0.5MB / second.

DNA

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

This is partially Window's fault. It takes me three years to write 15TB on a hdd on Linux.
Windows, however, won't keep the disk activity down.
Even at idle, the System process, To-Do, and Skype are doing a combined 0.5MB / second.

change pagefile location to the HDD as it writes a lot to disk and you will be good, most system processes mostly do read operations and small writes for logs and such

nuclearcat

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

This is partially Window's fault. It takes me three years to write 15TB on a hdd on Linux.
Windows, however, won't keep the disk activity down.
Even at idle, the System process, To-Do, and Skype are doing a combined 0.5MB / second.

change pagefile location to the HDD as it writes a lot to disk and u will be good, most system processes mostly do read operations and small writes for logs and such

Wont help much, as windows is pile of crap in this matters. I wonder how much write amplification is happening because of similar issues on write: https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/stat … 9004367873

DNA

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Well on my windows pc my ssd went down like 90% when i changed pagefile location its now negligible for the ssd's health.
Well this can't be the case for writes as it doesn't work this way and actually if that's the case with writes it is better for SSDs health to write 68bytes than 4K blocks each time for example although it is much slower.
I see what this guy means i agree with him but i don't see that being an issue as most explorer reads are from memory and not the disk so latency is minimal the only things i guess that are read from disk every single time are things that can be changed like history or things like that. i will test it out on my pc 700ms seems exaggerated if it takes that much every single time.

nuclearcat

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Exactly opposite, 61x68 bytes much worse than 1x4K blocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

It is explained somewhere in other tweets, each syscall have overhead cost. At the end we get 700ms delay, while it should be near instant operation.

DNA

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Exactly opposite, 61x68 bytes much worse than 1x4K blocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

It is explained somewhere in other tweets, each syscall have overhead cost. At the end we get 700ms delay, while it should be near instant operation.

No dude you didn't get what i am saying, i know 61x68 is much much worse than 1 4k.. what I mean is that if windows for example needs to update a file with just 1bytes of data for example and can do that directly without having to write 4k blocks it would be much more efficient for SSDs health but it can't do that nor can any OS. for sure if you need to write large chunks 4k is better.

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

I symlinked firefox's cache dir to drive D. I will change pagefile location now.

I also noticed that every hibernate is a 3GB disk write... I am not sure how to change the hibernate image location on this stupid OS.
On Linux, it's just a matter of creating a swap partition on the hdd and booting with resume=/dev/sdxy (where sdxy is the swap partition on the hdd).

Edit: Windows doesn't wish to use the pagefile on the hdd and says it created a temporary pagefile on c:\ the ssd so the pagefile trick doesn't help.

Last edited by VincentKeyboard (September 18 2019)

DNA

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

how come it don't wish to create a pagefile on your HDd there is definitely something wrong from your end. if you can provide more info...
well windows isn't stupid there is something wrong for it to create a temporary pagefile. linux being the open source OS it is things like that are simpler. but overall windows is much better

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

@DNA I disabled the pagefile on drive C, created one on drive D and rebooted. Windows complained with the following warning "Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer because" and the pagefile on C was back. I reverted my changes and rebooted.
There was a unused paging file on D:\
Regardless, my machine doesn't use half its ram so paging isn't an issue.

Anyway, what would have helped was if I could move hibernation image to D:\ but windows needs it at boot before mounting D:\ (according to google) so this approach won't work.

Last edited by VincentKeyboard (September 18 2019)

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Ok, I did some investigation (resource monitor) and most of the disk activity is in two locations:
1) The hibernate image. I solved this by disabling hibernate. I only lose 2% battery per hour on standby anyway. This was 3 to 4GB of writes every hibernation. Pretty bad.
2) heavy writing to c:\users\account\Appdata\

Is there any way to move my profile to the HDD?

@DNA There are a lot of shortcoming in the Windows architecture and ecosystem. One of the main reasons why Windows applications start up slower than Linux is the excessive internal library shipping. I have transmission, onedrive, cmake, etc.. all using their own copies of Qt. If they used a systemwide installed copy instead, startup would be faster as the copy would be already cached in memory with the first application that used it.
The same concept applies to disk writes. There is likely too much duplication and inefficiency.

Last edited by VincentKeyboard (September 18 2019)

DNA

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

There are lots of ways to fix the unmovable pagefile do ur research am sure you will fix it, personally most of the usage is from pagefile i use up lots of ram.
for the appdata yea you can move it the using the symbolik link you mive the folder and link the original directory to the new one there is a tutorial u can easily find it on google but please be warned if done incorrectly it could corrupt your profile and apps.
I know windows is bad compared with linux in the way it runs things but it is bery complex and runs on  older artitecture it needs an overhaul for sure but as it is and ith my PC i face 0 issues and no lag whatsoever the context menu mentioned above opens instantaneously am not sure where the 700ms can be felt.i have zero issues with windows really.

kareem_nasser

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Fellow lebgeekers. i think you should do a more extensive research on SSDs. Because some can virtually even have a longer lifespan than an HDD and we are talking about MLC here, which by the way is misinterpreted thanks to the marketing and naming/labeling of certain companies. As MLC has TLC and QLC under its umbrella with the latter having the lowest performance for an SSD once its SLC cache is used up.

What i am trying to say is you are taking things out of proportion regarding the lifespan and performance for an SSD, i recommend (if you haven't) to check the following website storagereview. There are many more which can actually give you an idea.

Regarding disabling windows paging, you can set it to minimum amount or leave to at automatic as the OS will manage it as needed. Given that most modern OSes recognize the SSD.

It all comes down to the usage but generally speaking you can easily go for a TLC SSD and the price difference is usually for variables like SLC cache, warranty and microcontroller. In any case you will still get the benefit of minimum seek latency and if NVMe interface then things are much better overall.

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

@DNA, I've disabled the pagefile completely to test your theory. So I am running on ram only at the moment. I'll give it till morning and if it doesn't eat 20GB of disk writes when it turn my back away, then your theory is plausible.

Edit. I almost called you DMA *shakes head*..

Last edited by VincentKeyboard (September 20 2019)

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

@DNA, disabling the pagefile eliminated about 80GB of disk writes per day. This is odd because I never crossed 4.5GB out of the 15.9GB installed ram.
I still cannot place a pagefile on D:\ and after asking elsewhere, I was told Windows doesn't "like" that approach since 1903.
Do you know of any solutions?
Thank you.

DNA

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Windows uses pagefile even if your ram isn't full and some games crash if you disable it even if you still have like 8GB free am not sure why.
well I really can't help you since i have the 1903 build and switched pagefile to D: with no issues. i really have no idea why its doing that on your PC mabe the drive isn't GPT or not NTFS?

VincentKeyboard

Member

Re: ssd health 99.0% remaining

Definitely GPT and NTFS.
C:\ is bitlocked and D:\ isn't.