As I'm looking at going all m2 in an upcoming build, I was curious what people think about SSD lifespan. I think these drives become obsolete due to size long before the write limit (TBW) is ever reached. Seems the (often considerable) extra money would only be for speed, which seems like a Porsche/Ferrari dilemma. Has anyone ever bumped into the write limit on any old SSD? I'm starting to find my earliest, 120GB drives are basically useless now and they have a lot of life left. I can see 2TB drives feeling that same way in ~5 years My Intel 660p use: Spoiler Here's what my usage curve looks like on my 2TB m2 drive, only used for games: Drive has 400 TBW limit (or) 400,000gb In 6 months it wrote 4210 gb of data. 23gb/day // 8420gb/year at this rate To hit the 400 TBW in 5 years would require: 220gb/day // 80,000gb/year It would seem I have 45+ years of life at that rate. TBW calculator
Yeah. With the Red Dead Redemption 2 PC requiring 150GB of free HD space, you just might be right. I guess the SSD makers have sent a signal to game studios to make the games use as much uncompressed data and bloat as possible to ensure people will keep buying new, bigger SSDs. After all, the SSD makers can't actually make the TBW too low because people would get angry and worried, so there must be other incentives.
My 6 years old 840Pro: promised 300 TBW. Now written 27.3 TB (condition 89%) So expected to last another 60 years. And as real tests for 840 gave some 1 - 2 PBW my could last upto 200 years or something like.
I've had older drives (not technically relevant anymore, just for historical purposes) like the Indilinx Barefoot based Corsair Extreme x64 fail on me. A few times actually. Also had them act weirdly, like losing their estimated life very fast, I don't remember exactly, but one of the drives I had lost like 1% life from 40GB of writes or so. That was with TRIM enabled, yes. The newer drives seem to have almost completely solved this type of behavior. On a 850 Evo I have which is rated at 150TBW, I've written around 10TB in 20 months. That would make it around 25 yrs of use? And if you read actual endurance tests, you see some of these drives hitting 2-4 Petabytes written for TLC drives. The 840 Pro famously lived for 9 Petas written. There is a newer test that did NVMe drives as well, and I think the 960 Evo lived for around 5-6 PTB, but I can't find the article anymore.The newer 970 I think died faster. These tests were done on 250-256GB drives, so larger drives would last longer. A more disappointing test is of a 600p that died at 100TBW, faster than the advertised 144TBW, but then again, these stress tests are not exactly realistic, as the drive is not idling at all and garbage collection might struggle on these conditions of fully written drives on a 100% continuous I/O stress. Gonna look for the newer test on NVMe drives, it's quite edifying. On a modern, brand drive like a Samsung Evo (250GB) you should be fine at least for 500TB and above.
I have replaced SSDs with PCIe Gen 4 quicker than i would wear them out. My SSDs are now used for either back ups or in external cases for archiving. I use 1TB Gen 4 Corsair MP600 NVMe for OS and DCS flight sim, a Gen 3 Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVM for my Steam Folder and a Samsung 860 QVO 1TB SSD for docs. Il get myself another Gen 4 NVMe drive to put the Steam stuff on and use the 970 for docs, the 860 will be for back ups as i cant be bother to remove it.
I'm using my SATA SSD's for games only, so according to my friend, my SSD's should last longer as I'm using them for static storage, no constant writing and rewriting.
The main problem is not a limited write resource(many ssd can actually exceed it limit and write more without faulting) but quality of controller and ram. PSU quality is also matter, hectic voltages and short circuit and ssd is fried. Also the firmware, many vendors set default setting and it`s fine but sometimes they tweak it and.. typical indian bad things happens - not so long ago was news that`s Hewlett Packard Enterprise sas ssd`s firmware has bug that completely brick ssd if its uptime exceed 32768 hours.. Crucial M4 few years ago had similar issues
Would you rather have a game take up 150 GB of space with uncompressed audio and assets or needing to reduce your gaming performance using up CPU cycles uncompressing them on the fly? As far as to your 'theories', they're just noise. I mean, do we blame the consumer for wanting to store TB of media too? What is the difference between using of TB for a gaming hobby or for storing your movies? I just bought a 2TB SSD for ~100 TB. My Crucial M4 512 is still at 97%. We didn't see these same complaints about HDD getting too small and old too...didi we? I was looking for something you claimed was an issue that is unique or even primarily prone to happening to SSDs. Not a one. The fundamental difference between an SSD and a HDD is the storage medium. Can you establish to me an SSD is more electrically or mechanically fragile compared to a HDD. Doubtful.
For modern CPUs the task of uncompressing is utterly meaningless as a performance hit. On the other hand I don't believe the audio and graphics need to be spotlessly lossless for any hi-fi purposes, but that's of course only my own opinion. I deem it different from a HC music hobby, for example, where I understand people preferring FLAC over MP3 (though I personally don't).
I don't know... for the current gen consoles, I think the horrible load times are from the weak CPU cores. I mean look at most gaming PC's these days. The pretty much all run off SATA or NVME SSDs, yet the load times aren't instant. I think the issue is that the decompression isn't threaded well or at all.
Hrm, your post is utterly irrelevant to an INSTALLED GAME. Right, games are a single binary blob. Sheesh... F1 Total LBAs Written 0 99 99 19.42 TB OK: Always passes This is my OS drive Sammy 850 Pro 256GB. At 97% it will last me for years and years as an OS drive. A lot of that usage was installing Windows Games until I picked up another 2TB Crucial. I think for some time a 256GB drive is going to be fine as the OS drive and there's no reason to use a larger one. Unless you do a lot of read erase for media work the typical installing of games and moves to SDD's is not going to result in lifespans shorter than your OS drive which is doing c constant PE cycles. Your storage drives are more or less static unless you're actively deleting or installing.
Star citizen is a single binary. = Data.p4k 55GB GW2 is single binary = Gw2.dat 45GB FFXIV uses 1.8GB dat files numbered dat0-7 for each 0x0000(or 1x0000) dat files with accompanying indexes that reference the data's location out of the maximum 14.4GB's addressable for each) Neverwinter uses 8GB, 2x6GB and 4GB for Sound, textures, binary and data files. LOTRO uses dat files up to 4GB's Warframe uses a single 25GB for textures on their own. was never implying that a single file be used overall, but nothing uses small loose files these days as its just not optimal.
Its not FLAC vs mp3, its more like accessing the mp3 directly or playing the mp3 within a .zip or .rar.
Game data was packed that way already 20 years ago. It's strange 1GHz single core PCs could handle loading it from a mechanical HDD, but supposedly 4GHz eight core PCs loading from an SSD can't. Anyway, just placing basically raw audio/image/video in a compressed archive doesn't make it majorly smaller. You need lossy compression for the individual files to make them significantly smaller, be they in loose folders on the SSD or in archives.
