[Discuss] Reducing wear on SSD drives - worth the effort and, if so, how?

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

This is a space where "price" or "quality" make a difference.

A "good" SSD has a lot of extra sectors to map in when it detects a write
error. All done internally to the drive. Better drives do a lot of things
to reduce wear. Some do dedup. Some don't store blocks that are all zero
or blocks that are all ones.

Its kind of hard to adjust your usage, suffice to say, it is all based on
the amount of change. Individual SSD cells can handle from 3,000 to
100,000 writes depending on the technology. It is possible to pay twice as
much for a drive that will have 30 times more usable write longevity.

If your data is largely unchanging, it doesn't matter. If you have a
highly dynamic write environment, go for single level cell NAND flash,
that will last the longest. Find a good enterprise drive that has extra
capacity to remap as cells fail.


> Hi all,
>
> The discussion about filesystems got me thinking about whether or not
> it's worth trying to reduce SSD wear on my first system (laptop) to have
> one. It occurred to me that file cloning seems like it could save a few
> writes...
>
> I've heard that some SSDs wear out pretty quickly, but I'm not sure if
> that's real or just rumor and innuendo.
>
> Anyone have thoughts on whether it's worth trying to reduce wear on the
> drive? If so, what kind of changes could I make to my system?
>
> I've installed Ubuntu, which I've been happy with as I'm not much of a
> sysadmin; I know it's resource heavy but I seem to be fine with 16gigs
> of ram.
>
> It's dual boot, but I haven't used windows except when I first got it to
> test; I'll wipe windows if I ever run low on space.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dan
>
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