Hey all, got a 128gb c300 a few weeks ago and I love it...getting BLAZING fast reads with it connected to my sata 6gbps mobo...
Right now, I have 80gb free after I installed windows, WoW and a few apps on it, but I heard that as you fill the ssd up, its performance starts to decline? Or is that a myth?
At what point is that? Just so I know what I should try to keep the free space at...thanks!
Not true.... SSD performance does not decrease as you fill up the drive alone.
However, SSD performance decreases when there are not enough clean blocks. This may occur if there is no more free space, TRIM is not being applied, lots of updates to files, or garbage collection does not have time to work.
If you fill up your 128GB SSD to 120GB but don't do that many writes, performance will be the same. However, if you do lots of random writes, performance may decrease. So free space combined with usage patterns determines when performance begins to take a hit.
SSDs tend to degrade over time, not by how much is on there. Obviously if you keep moving files on and off the harddrive, you are going to wear it out much quicker than just "reading" stuff, and that is probably what people mean. Writing/Copying tends to wear it out much quicker.
I haven't yet met a person who has actually worn out their SSD, mines still chuggling along after a year, despite probably 100+ reformats, but it could burn out tomorrow. Who knows? I don't trust that 1,000,000 hour life time crap, but I do think these suckers are a little more resilient than they are given credit for.
There are plenty of articles written about this.
I like this article myself, and its been revised and commented since its initial release in 2007. SSD Myths & Endurance
If you mean as far as how much stuff you have in there, I don't think it would matter weather you had 8mbs in it or 80gb. What would matter is how much data has been written and erased to it. Make shure yiu have trim enabled and try not to write and erase to much stuff to it. There is a great tweaking write up in the ssd section on here. Oh I would try reaimaging it every so aften maybe 3-4 months with a complete erase just to get it back to it's original blank state.
If it supports TRIM or garbage collection you don't really need to worry about it. If not you might notice a little drop but that will go away as soon as you free space again. I would create at least an 8gb partition and leave it empty, some drives sold as 100gb etc are actually 128gb with the extra space for overprovisioning. this gives the controller some room to move things around and level the wear of the drive across all parts instead of just one area. manual overprovisioning, just make an empty partition, don't format it, and you will give it that margin it needs to keep the drive healthy.
Originally Posted by RagingCain;12089809
SSDs tend to degrade over time, not by how much is on there. Obviously if you keep moving files on and off the harddrive, you are going to wear it out much quicker than just "reading" stuff, and that is probably what people mean. Writing/Copying tends to wear it out much quicker.
I haven't yet met a person who has actually worn out their SSD, mines still chuggling along after a year, despite probably 100+ reformats, but it could burn out tomorrow. Who knows? I don't trust that 1,000,000 hour life time crap, but I do think these suckers are a little more resilient than they are given credit for.
Nowadays, Trims is all handle by OS. Just being idle is all it takes now, although I believe it occurs when the file is freed up (deleted). I do recommend in power management to change (under whatever profile you use) to never turn off Hard-drive, there is no need on an SSD (no moving parts that can wear out) and it actually should speed up getting out of idle. Choice is yours. OCz do an excellent maintenance guide on SSDs, which they just converted from a forum thread to an actual site with linkies.
OCZ Tech SSD FAQ
Of course the guide is good for anyone, not just OCZ ssds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieHo;12089869
He's talking about performance degradation, not write endurance.
You mean 1,000,000hr MTBF... this is not life expectency.
SSDs do not just burn out (assuming not a firmware or hardware failure). They begin to remap worn out cells so usable space starts to decrease.
Neither nor.
TRIM occurs when you permentantly delete a file.
It cleans up the entire block instead of just deallocating the pages within the block.
Correct, I was suggesting that is what someone meant by what he was told. I like to throw out what they might have been referring to. Too much weird data out there about SSDs.
Originally Posted by RagingCain;12089809
SSDs tend to degrade over time, not by how much is on there. Obviously if you keep moving files on and off the harddrive, you are going to wear it out much quicker than just "reading" stuff, and that is probably what people mean. Writing/Copying tends to wear it out much quicker.
I haven't yet met a person who has actually worn out their SSD, mines still chuggling along after a year, despite probably 100+ reformats, but it could burn out tomorrow. Who knows? I don't trust that 1,000,000 hour life time crap, but I do think these suckers are a little more resilient than they are given credit for.
They won't 'burn out', more like you will start to notice really low and slow writes. It's actually not that bad because the reads still go on at full speed giving you time to back up to another drive. Also reformats aren't what kills it, it's the constant background reorganizing (such as defragging and indexing, etc) that wears out the write cycle.)
But a word of advice for everyone here: KILL YOUR PAGEFILE.
Using some SSD space as ram is probably the worst you can do for it.
Originally Posted by railfan844;12089891
They won't 'burn out', more like you will start to notice really low and slow writes. It's actually not that bad because the reads still go on at full speed giving you time to back up to another drive. Also reformats aren't what kills it, it's the constant background reorganizing (such as defragging and indexing, etc) that wears out the write cycle.)
But a word of advice for everyone here: KILL YOUR PAGEFILE.
Using some SSD space as ram is probably the worst you can do for it.
Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
Although it is accessed a ton on smaller memory systems, there isn't a better place for a pagefile than an SSD... other than a RAMDisk.
I haven't seen any proof of damage caused by Defragging, BUT, its not necessary as I believe SSDs have access to all the data at the same time and same speed. Something a spinning disc is just not physically capable of.
Many places recommend disabling it on that notion all together, but I just don't see the point of all the unnecessary read, copies, & writes, so disabling that makes common sense to me.
As far as any performance drops goes... is there a noticeable difference when we're talking about general use and not benchmarking? I would assume the various files on the SSD would still be extremely quick to access and read, even with degradation.
Originally Posted by EfemaN;12089987
As far as any performance drops goes... is there a noticeable difference when we're talking about general use and not benchmarking? I would assume the various files on the SSD would still be extremely quick to access and read, even with degradation.
Originally Posted by DuckieHo;12090290
The degradation can be VERY noticable. On older drives, the latency caused by the read-modify-write process could lock the drive up for a few seconds.
Wow, that's a wake-up call. Is going through the OCZ-recommended diskpart/sanitary erase/freespacecleaner method bad? I haven't formatted since the beginning of last summer; I'm itching to do a clean install again, probably this summer.
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