SSD life

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I have just installed an SSD as the main drive and am astonished at the speed difference it has made. I have received an email from Ablesoft offering a discount on their program SSD Fresh 2015, advertised as prolonging the life of an SSD. The drive warranty is three years no quibble, so the manufacturers must be confident about the reliability – is there a problem and is the software worth it – I know that the drive should not be defragged. The advertisement claims ” Reduces unnecessary read and write accesses – Turns off obsolete and unneeded services – Analyses and eliminates hazards for your SSD.

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If you have W7 or above, you probably don’t need it as these OSs support TRIM which optimises the drive. If you have XP, it may be beneficial.

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And it sounds a little like those PC tweak programs many here warn against,

:cheers:

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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SSD FRESH 2015

This software, although potentially usefull, is probably not needed when many of it’s reported actions
can easlily be replicated with other free software programs.
So, no. You do not need to be sucker punched into making a useless purchase.

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Given the tested lifespan of SSD drives I can’t see why you would ever need to load additional software.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2856052/grueling-endurance-test-blows-away-ssd-durability-fears.html

cheers, Paul

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Thanks to everyone for their advice/comments – I have read the pcworld article and am satisfied that I should have no worries on the longevity score – I will not buy the software

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SSD Life: My SSD experiences quite heavy use and I use no software to “look after it”, apart from the automatic Windows TRIM function. I use “Hard Disk Sentinel” to monitor all my drives. The predicted remaining life according to Hard Disk Sentinel is “more than 1 000 days”. (the total “up time” for this SSD to date is recorded as “184 days 18 hours”.

My Rig: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core CPU; ASUS Cross Hair VIII Formula Mobo; Win 11 Pro (64 bit)-(UEFI-booted); 32GB RAM; 2TB Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD. 1TB SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 NVME SSD; MSI GeForce RTX 3090 VENTUS 3X 24G OC; Microsoft 365 Home; Condusiv SSDKeeper Professional; Acronis Cyberprotect, VMWare Workstation Pro V17.5. HP 1TB USB SSD External Backup Drive). Dell G-Sync G3223Q 144Hz Monitor.

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. . . I use “Hard Disk Sentinel” to monitor all my drives.

@petesmst:

Thanks a big bunch for that tip.
You could read here why.

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My SSD is 3 years old and has a total power on hours of 4117 (171 days). In that time it has written 4356GB. Assuming a conservative 600TB lifespan I reckon I have another 300 years to go.

cheers, Paul

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I reckon I have another 300 years to go.

cheers, Paul

Enjoy it !

:cheers:

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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I still have my OCZ Vertex 3 that’s over 5+ years old.
It’s being used as a video ripping and conversion drive, and sees periods of
intense activity alternating with periods of dormancy.

The newer M.2 SSD that is my primary drive is running well with no issues to speak of.
It’s vintage only dates back to last January.

Windows keeps them optimized on a weekly basis automatically. I only need to intervene if the optimizations got missed for whatever reason.

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Most SSD brands have software which caches small file “Writes” until there’s a bunch of them and then it writes them all at once. This does actually extend the life of the SSD. Depending on which SSD you purchased it probably has this feature built-in. Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 10 all turn off unnecessary features such as Defragmentation, Prefetch, etc. Other features that remain will benefit from having the SSD’s extra speed (Paging file, Indexing, etc.), even though some “tweaky” users will insist on disabling those features to gain a tiny bit of extra life from the drive. All SSDs have “garbage collection” which ensures performance will be maintained in Windows XP (which lacks the TRIM function).

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Defragmentation is not turned off, it just performs differently on an SSD.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx

cheers, Paul

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I’m so glad to hear reports of SSD’s that have lasted for years, not days or weeks.

A PNY drive that I bought directly from PNY lasted only about three months before it died.
I called PNY Support and they refused to replace the drive. So now PNY is on my SH** list.

I ordered a new SanDisk SSD from Amazon and it came with a link to download the “SanDisk SSD Dashboard” that includes Trim. Trim is set up to run once a week, automatically. The drive is lightning fast and I’m really very happy with it.

But, once burned, twice shy! I do a full backup of my SSD once a week, just in case it should ever fail.
All my data files are backed up daily, to two USB 3.0 devices.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

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I’m so glad to hear reports of SSD’s that have lasted for years, not days or weeks.

A PNY drive that I bought directly from PNY lasted only about three months before it died.
I called PNY Support and they refused to replace the drive. So now PNY is on my SH** list.

The Doctor

Less than 3 month warrantee ? That alone should be sufficient reason to avoid..
f’em

:cheers:

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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A few years ago we had a Kingston 64GB SV100 SSD fail suddenly. Kingston support replaced the drive without question and even sent a newer model SV200. That’s a better way to retain at least a modicum of respect from your customers. The replacement drive, as well as two 96GB Kingston SSDs we use in our other PCs, are still working great today.

Sadly, Kingston sullied their reputation a couple of years ago. After introducing the SV300 model with positive reviews on several well-respected websites, Kingston replaced the synchronous NAND chips in that model with cheaper a-synchronous NAND. The result of this change is a significant reduction in the drive’s Write speed on any and all incompressible data (which includes nearly all video, music, photos, etc.) and some types of random data, too. Kingston chose not to change the model number or even reduce the price to reflect that broad performance downgrade and, worse, they chose not to reveal the change. When confronted, a Kingston spokesperson simply kept repeating that the SSD still meets it basic specification as measured by a favorable benchmark test called ATTO. As you may know, the ATTO benchmark is akin to measuring your car’s top speed while driving downhill with a tailwind. Other well-known and more realistic benchmarks such as AS-SSD and CrystalDiskMark show the drastic drop in performance experienced when an SV300 is equipped with the a-synchronous NAND chips. Just to prove there’s a silver lining to every dark cloud you can now buy a bundle of 3 or 4 V300s for a real knockdown price and, to be fair, if all you need is decently fast Read speeds (and Write speeds slower than a regular spinning hard drive don’t matter) then this could be a bargain for some!

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A few years ago we had a Kingston 64GB SV100 SSD fail suddenly. Kingston support replaced the drive without question and even sent a newer model SV200. That’s a better way to retain at least a modicum of respect from your customers. The replacement drive, as well as two 96GB Kingston SSDs we use in our other PCs, are still working great today.

Sadly, Kingston sullied their reputation a couple of years ago. After introducing the SV300 model with positive reviews on several well-respected websites, Kingston replaced the synchronous NAND chips in that model with cheaper a-synchronous NAND. The result of this change is a significant reduction in the drive’s Write speed on any and all incompressible data (which includes nearly all video, music, photos, etc.) and some types of random data, too. Kingston chose not to change the model number or even reduce the price to reflect that broad performance downgrade and, worse, they chose not to reveal the change. When confronted, a Kingston spokesperson simply kept repeating that the SSD still meets it basic specification as measured by a favorable benchmark test called ATTO. As you may know, the ATTO benchmark is akin to measuring your car’s top speed while driving downhill with a tailwind. Other well-known and more realistic benchmarks such as AS-SSD and CrystalDiskMark show the drastic drop in performance experienced when an SV300 is equipped with the a-synchronous NAND chips. Just to prove there’s a silver lining to every dark cloud you can now buy a bundle of 3 or 4 V300s for a real knockdown price and, to be fair, if all you need is decently fast Read speeds (and Write speeds slower than a regular spinning hard drive don’t matter) then this could be a bargain for some!

Nice Marvin I thought ATTO was a pretty decent benchmark product myself – Are you sure about this?
Good info if its true nevertheless.
As long as you backup your SSD every day there should be no reason to worry and I would highly recommend the FREE Acronis Drivemonitor program its a real lifesaver and very useful product.

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omendata said: “Nice Marvin I thought ATTO was a pretty decent benchmark product myself – Are you sure about this?”

Yes, i’m sure. To simplify, let’s consider two types of data and two types of workload.
Compressible data = Operating System (Windows) and most programs.
Incompressible data = movies, music, photos

ATTO benchmark test uses only Compressible data, and it’s written sequentially (not randomly). This is an easy test for any SSD and usually produces the best looking results (fast speeds). Manufacturers love this benchmark.

AS-SSD benchmark test and CrystalDiskMark test use Incompressible data some of which is randomly chosen (not sequential). These are more difficult tests and a better indication of real-world performance in your computer.

Light workload vs. Heavy workload:
Home computers using the internet, email, Microsoft Office, streaming video or audio, playing games and other common tasks would be considered Light workload situations. Budget-priced SSDs work well here because most of the SSD’s activity is opening and reading files. Low or limited “Write” speeds don’t matter much. The Kingston V300 falls into this category. Other budget-price range models that produce superior results compared to the Kingston include Crucial BX100, Sandisk Ultra II, G-Skill and Mushkin.
Computers that do video, photo and music editing (especially batch editing) and sitiuations where large files or batches of files are being copied or transferred back and forth are considered Heavy workloads. If you want good performance for these Write-intensive tasks you should look at higher-priced SSDs such as Sandisk Extreme Pro, Intel 730 and Samsung 850 Pro (also the Samsung 850 EVO is pretty good here, too).
One HUGELY important point here is that the biggest jump in performance you are going to experience is when you go from using a regular spinning hard drive to an SSD. Classic example: My girlfriend’s PC is a 2007 or 2008 vintage rig with a Core2Duo E6750 @2.66Ghz with 4GB of DDR2-800 RAM. The SATA ports are all SATA II (not SATA III). When she had a WD 500GB 7200rpm hard drive Windows bootup time was approx. 1.5 minutes and typical program and game load times were 10 to 25 seconds. After cloning her hard drive contents onto an early Kingston SV100+ 96GB SSD her Windows boot time dropped to about 22 seconds and program load times dropped to 4 to 10 seconds. Her internet browser (which opens with 8 different webpages/tabs) is also noticeably faster but i didn’t actually time it). Anyway, those benefits turbo-charged her old-ish PC and she’s still happily using it today.

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The other thing to consider if you do a lot of disk activity is sustained performance.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9408/ocz-trion-100-240gb-480gb-960gb-review/2

cheers, Paul

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The other thing to consider if you do a lot of disk activity is sustained performance.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9408/ocz-trion-100-240gb-480gb-960gb-review/2

cheers, Paul

Agreed. That puts the heavy in Heavy workload! Usually, an SSD only needs to Read or Write data for, say, 0.5 seconds to 5 seconds. All SSDs have a buffer memory chip or cache, and such data usually fits within the drive’s cache so that Write performance is very good until the cache is exhausted. That’s when high-performance (and high-priced) SSDs show their worth. They maintain performance longer and recover much more quickly, the result being they can achieve “sustained” Writes at a pretty high speed compared to budget-priced models. But, again, most of us don’t need that much horsepower for everyday work. And, the occasional video or photo editing tasks will be handled just fine by most budget SSD models, no problem. We shoot 1080p and 720p/60fps video of grandkids and the new house-wrecker kitten, and i edit and transcode them on various SSDs including a Sandisk Ultra, Mushkin ECO2, and others. Results are quick and very satisfactory. Even if i’m using the Sandisk Extreme model it’s likely i’ll take a break while the edited version of the video is being saved or transcoded so it makes no difference to me whether that task requires 2 minutes or 5 minutes.

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