[Jennasis]

Hi all, just thought I would post this as I just checked my Vertex drive life and was shocked to find only 37% remaining life when it was only bought in October.

I had followed all recommended tweaks including putting all temp folders for windows, IE, Chrome etc on a normal hdd, putting the swap on separate drive and pretty much switching it off, turning off indexing and defrag etc etc

I checked processes in Procmon after seeing this alarming figure and found out that Rainmeter writes small files constantly to both it's own install folder, as well as through appdata and also in other areas. I have now set all these access routes to dynamic links on a separate drive and hope that that will slow down the degradation.

Hope this is useful to people!

 

[DuckieHo]

What is the volume of writes by Rainmeter? I believe you can trace by process in the Windows Performance Monitor. (I'm on XP at work so I can't verify.)

Software tools reading "remaining life" are inaccurate.

 

[Jennasis]

Well write endurance on the original vertex cells is 5000 PE and the current average is between 3 and 4k writes.

Rainmeter writes many tiny files a second avg between 1 and 8 (length) in Disk Monitor

 

[Fusion Racing]

Going by Windows, Rainmeter never really writes to my drive. Only does if I close and re open it.

 

[Jennasis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fusion Racing;13100531
Going by Windows, Rainmeter never really writes to my drive. Only does if I close and re open it.

It seems to concentrate most of it's file creation and deletion on weather and temp apps, if you are not using those it might not be causing as much of an issue

 

[Fusion Racing]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jennasis;13100561
It seems to concentrate most of it's file creation and deletion on weather and temp apps, if you are not using those it might not be causing as much of an issue

I only use a clock and one for Winamp. That said I doubt Rainmeter uses the drive more than Windows does just running so I cant see how that could kill a drive very quickly.

 

[DuckieHo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jennasis;13100469
Well write endurance on the original vertex cells is 5000 PE and the current average is between 3 and 4k writes.

Rainmeter writes many tiny files a second avg between 1 and 8 (length) in Disk Monitor

Can you point it to a RAMDisk?

Sounds like bad coding.... programs should not be do read/writes that often if they can help it....

 

[Chunky_Chimp]

I have extreme doubts that it's Rainmeter that's sucked the health out of the drive. Back when my Falcon worked (it's sort of a Vertex clone, though I have the 64GB version) I was using Rainmeter for most of its life (which was more than a year), and its health never went below 80-90%.

 

[Jennasis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fusion Racing;13100577
I only use a clock and one for Winamp. That said I doubt Rainmeter uses the drive more than Windows does just running so I cant see how that could kill a drive very quickly.

It's the only thing in my Procmon that did any amount of writing to my ssd; windows writes a minuscule amount in comparison and all the tiny writes seem to have been chewing through the PE count; All windows temps are linked to my E drive so only windows write is the odd explorer one really.

 

[Jennasis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DuckieHo;13100611
Can you point it to a RAMDisk?

Sounds like bad coding.... programs should not be do read/writes that often if they can help it....

You'll have to help me on that one, never used a ramdisk

 

[Jennasis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chunky_Chimp;13100615
I have extreme doubts that it's Rainmeter that's sucked the health out of the drive. Back when my Falcon worked (it's sort of a Vertex clone, though I have the 64GB version) I was using Rainmeter for most of its life (which was more than a year), and its health never went below 80-90%.

Did you use the Dark Rainmeter weather skin? 99% of rainmeters writes and erases are to and from that skin in my processes here.

 

[Chunky_Chimp]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jennasis;13100641
Did you use the Dark Rainmeter weather skin? 99% of rainmeters writes and erases are to and from that skin in my processes here.

Yes, as well as HUD.Vision and Enigma, though the latter's a stock skin IIRC.

 

[Jennasis]

Here's a tiny snapshot of a few miliseconds of write activity from Rainmeter, which was previously going to C:\

Mostly it's from the system temp and weather skins and they are really tiny writes, loads per second

 

[Krusher33]

With that much action by a Rainmeter app, was there not much of a overall pc performance change? I imagine it must have been hogging some cpu usage.

 

[MechanicalHand]

what did you use to check this?

 

[BradleyW]

How did you even check the life of your SSD?

 

[Jennasis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Krusher33;13100735
With that much action by a Rainmeter app, was there not much of a overall pc performance change? I imagine it must have been hogging some cpu usage.

No CPU useage really noticed, Idles at 1 to 2% with rainmeter running, no performance decrease to suggest anything funky was going on

 

[Jennasis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MechanicalHand;13100761
what did you use to check this?

The writes or the life?
The writes I used Procmon and Diskmon from Sysinternals Suite (free dl from MS)
Quote:

Originally Posted by BradleyW;13100766
How did you even check the life of your SSD?

Drive life is checked via smartctl which gives raw Data and life in percentage

 

[DuckieHo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Krusher33;13100735
With that much action by a Rainmeter app, was there not much of a overall pc performance change? I imagine it must have been hogging some cpu usage.

If it logging data and such, it barely hits the CPU.

 

[Jennasis]

Re prev questions:

You can download Sysinternals suite from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062

and Smartmontools (inc smartctl) from here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki