SSD lifetime writes too high!

[Bryan Lei]

I've replaced my SSD twice now, because the old one with around 200 days open has been rapidly dying (health) and I noticed that the lifetime writes are around 80TB already! So I bought a replacement and did a disk clone from the old drive (only 240GB SSDs) and after 1 day of using I was surprised that it has over 6TB of lifetime writes, and now at day 3 it's over 8TB! Is there a problem with my operating system?

[Eigenvektor]

13 minutes ago, Bryan Lei said:

Is there a problem with my operating system?

And your operating system and SSD in question are?

 

Maybe provide a bit more info about the system in general and what you're using it for. The writes have to come from somewhere, so it's going to matter whether you're simply playing games or encoding terabytes of video data or something.

[Bryan Lei]

4 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

And your operating system and SSD in question are?

OS: Windows 11 Pro 23H2
SSD: Kingston A400 SATA SSD (a replacement for now) *120gb

[johnt]

The program could be reporting the wrong information... Did you try a second program?

[Bryan Lei]

12 minutes ago, johnt said:

The program could be reporting the wrong information... Did you try a second program?

Also checked using CrystalDiskInfo, same thing.

[TheProfosist]

Yes CrystalDisk is going to be better. Whats the OS and what is the rest of the system specs. Not enough RAM will murder a drive in not time with Page File. I use ~20GB of ram so when a system only has 16GB im constantly swapping 4GB.

[Bryan Lei]

46 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Maybe provide a bit more info about the system in general and what you're using it for. The writes have to come from somewhere, so it's going to matter whether you're simply playing games or encoding terabytes of video data or something.

This is my office computer, I go to work every day, do some minor CAD works (all the heavy files are in the secondary HDD), and some minor documents (MS word, excel, etc.), and some 3D renderings but not to the point that it uses more than 1GB of resources, not that big of a construction company for now.

[Eigenvektor]

3 minutes ago, Bryan Lei said:

This is my office computer, I go to work every day, do some minor CAD works (all the heavy files are in the secondary HDD), and some minor documents (MS word, excel, etc.), and some 3D renderings but not to the point that it uses more than 1GB of resources, not that big of a construction company for now.

The CAD program might be using the C drive as some sort of scratch disk for temporary files. Or as @TheProfosist said, if you have very too little RAM, the computer might be swapping a lot.

 

You could try moving the swap file to the HDD, though that will be a ton slower. And maybe check the CAD program for any kind of temporary file setting.

 

~edit: You could also open Task Manager or better Resource Monitor while you're working, sort by disk usage and see which processes are making heavy use of the disk.

[Electronics Wizardy]

One thing you can check is something like HWinfo that shows Writes since boot and compare that with the diff in the reports writes on the SSD since you booted it. 

 

I'd generally not care about TBW on the drive, and just replace it when it dies and restore backups. 

[Bryan Lei]

2 minutes ago, TheProfosist said:

Yes CrystalDisk is going to be better. Whats the OS and what is the rest of the system specs. Not enough RAM will murder a drive in not time with Page File. I use ~20GB of ram so when a system only has 16GB im constantly swapping 4GB.

Windows 11 Pro 23H2

 

Ryzen 5 3600

2x8GB TForce Delta DDR4 3200MHz

Asus Prime B450M-A

New Kingston A400 120GB SSD (same issue happened to the 240gb one previously)

1TB Seagate for all the heavy stuff (even my downloads, documents, videos, and pictures are in it)

 

I don't quite understand what you mean about the "Not enough RAM", my personal computer in my home also has a WIndows 11 Pro and previously with a 16GB RAM, I frequently check the information of the drives and it doesn't appear to be near the previous drive of my office computer (which is 85TB), plus I do all things in my personal computer like gaming, 3d modelling, movies, etc. and it doesn't do this issue at all.

[Bryan Lei]

5 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

The CAD program might be using the C drive as some sort of scratch disk for temporary files. Or as @TheProfosist said, if you have very too little RAM, the computer might be swapping a lot.

 

You could try moving the swap file to the HDD, though that will be a ton slower. And maybe check the CAD program for any kind of temporary file setting.

 

Let me get into this. I'll post an update afterwards. Thanks!

[TheProfosist]

Pop open task manager while you have everything open youre working on and see how much RAM is in use, feel free to share a screenshot.

[Eigenvektor]

3 minutes ago, Bryan Lei said:

I don't quite understand what you mean about the "Not enough RAM",

Not enough in the sense that Windows has to move data from physical RAM to swap a lot because the programs you're using require more than what is available

[mariushm]

Process Monitor from SysInternals Suite can also tell you to a very fine degree what each application running on your computer is doing.

 

You can disable monitoring for everything except reading or writing data to storage, and then you'll see an entry in the list every time an application reads some data or writes some data and you can filter further to see only some applications (add rule for example process is not explorer.exe then show in list  and so on.

 

Link : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

 

ps,..   also be aware if you have functions like auto save every 5 minutes in programs, or something like that. Those can do lots of writes.

 

If you drive seems fuller than normal you could also use WinDirStat to visually see the size of folders and see which files are big or shouldn't exist (for example  a hidden TEMP folder with tens of GB in it)

For example, in the past some versions of Adobe Acrobat had a bug that made it write gigabytes of log files each day (some repeated error message about checking license or something like that) and you would only notice increase of disk space used  but not find that log easily

[Bryan Lei]

4 minutes ago, TheProfosist said:

Pop open task manager while you have everything open youre working on and see how much RAM is in use, feel free to share a screenshot.

Opened Autodesk AutoCAD with my previous work, also opened SketchUp Pro and rendered something using Chaos Enscape. Stable at 9GB of RAM usage, a lot less for sure if I'm not doing any 3D works.

[Bryan Lei]

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Process Monitor from SysInternals Suite can also tell you to a very fine degree what each application running on your computer is doing.

 

You can disable monitoring for everything except reading or writing data to storage, and then you'll see an entry in the list every time an application reads some data or writes some data and you can filter further to see only some applications (add rule for example process is not explorer.exe then show in list  and so on.

 

Link : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

 

 

Currently doing this, thanks.

[Bryan Lei]

UPDATE: I've been checking the writes on the Process Monitor: Sysinternals, and it's a list:

 

svchost.exe

BrYNSvc.exe (Brother Printing)

msedge.exe

ctfmon.exe

node.exe

nvcontainer.exe (Nvidia)

sihost.exe

Widgets.exe (what is this? lol)

acad.exe (AutoCAD) *but only when I open the program

ADPClientServices (Apparently AutoCAD also)

[Kilrah]

 

Your programs are allocating 17GB of RAM in total, even though they're not actually using all of it right now they're still causing the OS to have to be ready for when they are, i.e. it'll push stuff to pagefile preemptively and keep physical RAM usage low in anticipation for when the programs are going to fill that RAM they said they need.

 

Might be able to find which program reserves that much in advance by starting them and using them a bit one after the other, and then see if there's some setting in the culprit to limit RAM usage.

 

Or try to just disable the pagefile altogether and see if that reduces those writes. If so see if the programs still work and never actually need that much RAM (i.e. they're poorly designed) or if you actually need more RAM.

[TheProfosist]

One thing I will say was that Win8 and Win10 were pretty OK with disabling Page File. I disabled it on any system I knew didnt need it. Back in the Vista/7 era that would have been 8GB or more. Win11 however seems to be quite a bit more grumpy and throws error about not having enough ram even though there is plenty of physical ram left on the system. I think this may be related to the newer virtualization features.

[Bryan Lei]

6 minutes ago, TheProfosist said:

One thing I will say was that Win8 and Win10 were pretty OK with disabling Page File. I disabled it on any system I knew didnt need it. Back in the Vista/7 era that would have been 8GB or more. Win11 however seems to be quite a bit more grumpy and throws error about not having enough ram even though there is plenty of physical ram left on the system. I think this may be related to the newer virtualization features.

Will try it out first without a pagefile, I'll also check my computer at home if it has the same pagefile memory since before disabling it on my office computer it was around 8gb of pagefile.

[CDR_Xavier]

1 hour ago, Bryan Lei said:

Will try it out first without a pagefile, I'll also check my computer at home if it has the same pagefile memory since before disabling it on my office computer it was around 8gb of pagefile.

time to get some cheap $5 ebay Optane?

$5 for 16GB of high-endurance drive (300TBW rating), typical m.2 format.
Or just shove more ram.

 

Windows will want a certain percentage of RAM as a pagefile so it can save content when it bluescreens. I think it make sense.

Seems like it is about 20%.

Typically pagefile isnt used very frequently, since ram is so much faster.

but in such a case where you are actively running out of memory, it will allocate and use big page file, and your SSD will cry.

 

Was also confused a bit. Don't worry about the "cached" bit. Windows will cache disk content in memory to speed up stuff. When programs allocate memory those are discarded. The "committed" is the actual "content" that's in ram+page, over the total ram+page size.

 

On my 16GB system I only have a page file size of 2GB, as most of the time the system is idling at desktop hosting SMB file share. Sometimes I type up document, which dont eat ram either.

[Bryan Lei]

On 4/20/2024 at 4:29 PM, CDR_Xavier said:

time to get some cheap $5 ebay Optane?

$5 for 16GB of high-endurance drive (300TBW rating), typical m.2 format.
Or just shove more ram.

 

Windows will want a certain percentage of RAM as a pagefile so it can save content when it bluescreens. I think it make sense.

Seems like it is about 20%.

Typically pagefile isnt used very frequently, since ram is so much faster.

but in such a case where you are actively running out of memory, it will allocate and use big page file, and your SSD will cry.

 

Was also confused a bit. Don't worry about the "cached" bit. Windows will cache disk content in memory to speed up stuff. When programs allocate memory those are discarded. The "committed" is the actual "content" that's in ram+page, over the total ram+page size.

 

On my 16GB system I only have a page file size of 2GB, as most of the time the system is idling at desktop hosting SMB file share. Sometimes I type up document, which dont eat ram either.

As of today, even with 0 mb of Pagefile something still writes on the OS drive, because I'm almost at 9TB of lifetime writes without doing something but some browsing and opening documents only (using today after last usage which is the day before yesterday). I'm already losing hope, though someone said that lifetime writes don't matter that much, maybe I'm going to buy a mid-tier nvme with dram cache for a permanent usability and putting a new fresh operating system.

 

April 20, 2024 - 8.31 TB Lifetime Writes; 1 day 11 hours Power on time; 100 health and performance

April 21, 2024 - No work, didn't use the computer.

April 22, 2024 - 8.93TB Lifetime Writes; 1 day 13 hours Power on time; 100 health and performance

 

I think I'll end this topic since it's hard for me to trace the issue, and some of you probably know how to do it, show it, or even teach it, but I'm just a regular consumer which has some knowledge about computer hardware and tiny bit on software side. And it's definitely on me for not having a solution to this topic. Thanks everyone for helping, hope to chat with y'all again soon! 

 

last update: it went up to 8.95TB as of typing this reply lol

[Kilrah]

I'd then open the Resource monitor, go to drives page, sort by writes

[CDR_Xavier]

10 hours ago, Bryan Lei said:

something still writes on the OS drive

A graph of all processes sorted by disk usage wouldn't be the worst idea.

Resource Monitor works as well.

 

Just a note, was the system fresh installed on this SSD or is it cloned from a harddrive If it is trying to defragment it, that would do quite a bit of write amplification.

 

400GB per two hour is an absurd amount of write. Did you ran ransomware/virus detection?

 

Right-click and display command line can help trace what/where tf is the actual process.