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Should I be worried of SSD "write limit"?

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There is nothing to be worried about.
In the early years of SSD's,  controllers were not really that good, OS optimizations was still wonky and there wasn't TRIM support.
These days both the Software and hardware going into SSD's made by the major companies like Samsung are really great quality.
A few years back there was an SSD endurance test and a Samsung 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB before it stopped working. Newer drives are even better and last longer.

If you are still worried, buy something like a Samsung Pro series SSD for that extra peace of mind.

As for going all SSD's for storage, I did it and will never go back to using HDD's. As for going from HDD's to SSD's for storage in relation to video production, I was amazed at how Adobe Premier was quite a bit speedier.

So for my next build I want a 500 GB SSD for OS and a 2TB SSD for storage; however, I've heard people say that SSDs have a certain write limit and they become unusable when that limit is reached. Apparently it can take years to reach the limit but I will be writing large files to it daily (multiple large video renders/recordings). 

 

So so should I get an HDD for storage instead? 

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1 minute ago, Celios said:

So for my next build I want a 500 GB SSD for OS and a 2TB SSD for storage; however, I've heard people say that SSDs have a certain write limit and they become unusable when that limit is reached. Apparently it can take years to reach the limit but I will be writing large files to it daily (multiple large video renders/recordings). 

 

So so should I get an HDD for storage instead? 

Not really. The write limits usually consider a full disk write (or multiple) per day, per years. Something that is extremely stressing. And usually, drives fails much more further on the line than when they are "supposed" to considering their writing limits.

 

So no, don't worry.

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The write limit is usually very high. Manufacturers tend to give very conservative ratings for them whereas in reality you can write a lot to the ssd. Especially if you're getting a 2tb ssd for storage, that means that if you, say, wrote 100tb of data to it, you'd only have used up 50 write cycles.

 

It's not something you should be worried about; even if you do exceed the SSDs actual write limit the JEDEC spec states that your ssd needs to be able to hold the data on there for 12 months. Basically, once you hit the write limit your ssd will basically not let any more writes through to it and become read only, so you can get all your data off it.

 

On a side note, which SSDs are you looking at?

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Cheap SSDs can wear out with little writes, usually rated for 35-50 or so TB and can survive more than that. 

 

With modern apps like Chrome and Firefox writing 20-30GB a day, these drives will take a while to wear out. 

 

However, high end SSDs like Samsung's 850 PRO can survive insane writes - https://packet.company/blog/ did a test and had a 1TB 850 PRO survive 7PB of writes. 

 

Cheap drives can usually survive around 500TB to 1PB of writes, and would do a good job as well 

 

idk

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There is nothing to be worried about.
In the early years of SSD's,  controllers were not really that good, OS optimizations was still wonky and there wasn't TRIM support.
These days both the Software and hardware going into SSD's made by the major companies like Samsung are really great quality.
A few years back there was an SSD endurance test and a Samsung 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB before it stopped working. Newer drives are even better and last longer.

If you are still worried, buy something like a Samsung Pro series SSD for that extra peace of mind.

As for going all SSD's for storage, I did it and will never go back to using HDD's. As for going from HDD's to SSD's for storage in relation to video production, I was amazed at how Adobe Premier was quite a bit speedier.

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My current SSD 240GB only has 11TB of data that has been written to it in the last few years I've had it, and is showing 96% helath status, at this rate I could still be using this drive in 20-30 years time, LOL.

I don't think you'll have a problem with a 2TB drive at all, it will be rated at many petabytes I would think.

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Okay, thanks everyone, I can buy with peace at mind now; I also thought once the write limit was reached the drive was dead, good to know I can still get data off of it haha. 

 

Im always super paranoid about data loss since I almost lost a lot of family photos a few years back because my Windows install got corrupt, I managed to recover it though. I now have a lot of my files backed up to my OS SSD drive, Storage HDD, External HDD and Google Drive... I know, a bit excessive. 

 

 @DocSwag I am thinking of getting two Samsung 850s (500GB and 1TB). I was also looking at PCIE SSDs and NVMe but it doesn't seem worth it for what I do. 

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28 minutes ago, Celios said:

Okay, thanks everyone, I can buy with peace at mind now; I also thought once the write limit was reached the drive was dead, good to know I can still get data off of it haha. 

 

Im always super paranoid about data loss since I almost lost a lot of family photos a few years back because my Windows install got corrupt, I managed to recover it though. I now have a lot of my files backed up to my OS SSD drive, Storage HDD, External HDD and Google Drive... I know, a bit excessive. 

 

 @DocSwag I am thinking of getting two Samsung 850s (500GB and 1TB). I was also looking at PCIE SSDs and NVMe but it doesn't seem worth it for what I do. 

Pro or evo? Either is probably fine though.

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9 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Pro or evo? Either is probably fine though.

Evo.

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12 minutes ago, Celios said:

Evo.

Yeah judging by the Anandtech 850 evo review the 850 evo has around 2000 write cycles. So with that 500gb one even if you write 100gb a day with 3x write amplification you'd still see it lasting 10 years. Shouldn't be an issue.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/4

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21 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Yeah judging by the Anandtech 850 evo review the 850 evo has around 2000 write cycles. So with that 500gb one even if you write 100gb a day with 3x write amplification you'd still see it lasting 10 years. Shouldn't be an issue.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/4

I got most of that except the "3x write amplification" bit :P 

I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to storage stuff.

 

Thanks though!

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18 minutes ago, Celios said:

I got most of that except the "3x write amplification" bit :P 

I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to storage stuff.

 

Thanks though!

Write amplification basically refers to the ratio of how much data your ssd actually writes/ how much data you tell your ssd to write. At first glance you may think, "Why is this the case? If I tell my ssd to write 4mb of stuff, it should just write 4mb of stuff. Right?"

 

The reason is a bit complicated.

 

With NAND, the stuff in your ssd that stores data, the smallest thing you can write to and read from is a page. A page is usually 4kb or 8gb in size. Remember, this is the SMALLEST thing you can read or write from. So if you had a 2kb file you wanted to write to your ssd, you would have to actually write 4kb or 8kb instead. To read it, you would actually have to read 4kb or 8kb instead.

 

It gets even worse. While a page is the smallest thing you can read or write from, there's another thing, called a block. This is the smallest thing you can erase in an ssd, and is usually 128 pages in size. If you write some data to nand flash, and want to change it, you first have to erase the flash before writing to it again.

 

So now let's think of an example. Let's say we have an ssd with a page size of 4kb, and a block size of 5 pages (or 20kb). The whole ssd only had one block. Let's say we write an 8kb picture to the ssd.

 

Naturally, the SSD is going to have to write to two pages. Let's say the pages are P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5. Our picture is now stored on P1 and P2.

 

Now we write another 8kb picture. This is stored in P3 and P4.

 

Now we go and write a 4kb text file to the ssd. Let's say it gets stored in P5.

 

Now we have written 20kb to the ssd. The ssd has written 20kb to the flash. Write amplification is still 1x.

 

However, let's say you went and modified that text file. Maybe just one character. And then you overwrit the text file. As far as your os is concerned, you've just written 4kb to the ssd. However, the ssd has to do something different.

 

Remember, before we write to the ssd page it has to be erased first. However, our page already has data on it. So what do we have to do? We have to erase the whole block and rewrite all that data to the block.

 

So instead of just writing 4kb of data, our ssd has to read all 20kb data off the block and into dram, erase the whole block, and then write another 20kb to the flash. The OS told the ssd to write 4kb, but the ssd wrote 20kb. See how the write amplification problem happens?

 

If you want more detailed explanations about everything, you might want to check out these articles from Anandtech. They are quite long though.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738

 

So basically, when I say 100gb of writes with a write amplification of 3x, that means you write 100gb to the ssd but it actually writes 300gb.

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And if you're curious (or a stalker) I have a Just Black Pixel 2 XL 64gb

 

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