SSD drive for TRS2012 - Worth the cost?

LNERlover5 · Mar 1, 2015

Manufacturer drive lifetime ratings are outstanding if they are to believed. 40GB's per day for up to 10 years for an 850 PRO drive?!? My Budget MX100 is 'only' rated at 20GB a day for 5 years, a workload it never achieves, which should give me a decent amount of headroom for the future.

johnwhelan · Mar 1, 2015

LNERlover5 said:
Manufacturer drive lifetime ratings are outstanding if they are to believed. 40GB's per day for up to 10 years for an 850 PRO drive?!? My Budget MX100 is 'only' rated at 20GB a day for 5 years, a workload it never achieves, which should give me a decent amount of headroom for the future.

But that is average not shuffling file segments around, when you defrag typically you do a lot of writing as you copy the file from one section to another. There can be a difference between estimated ten year life and real life.

Cheerio John

LNERlover5 · Mar 1, 2015

johnwhelan said:
But that is average not shuffling file segments around, when you defrag typically you do a lot of writing as you copy the file from one section to another. There can be a difference between estimated ten year life and real life.

Cheerio John

Except I will not be defragmenting. It's completely detrimental to the intended operation of an SSD since they function optimally with information spread onto as many of the NAND chips as possible.

Various drives have been stress tested, they do exceed expectation. Remarkable consumer technology as far as I am concerned.

Further reading: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes/4

BuilderBob · Mar 1, 2015

johnwhelan said:
Interesting so your theory is the number of writes to a SSD makes no difference to reliability or life expectancy of the device. This appears to differ from the manufacturers view.

No. And that's not what I said. I said that the impact of defragmenting on the life of the drive is insignificant.

If a typical drive has a life of five years then it supports about 20GB of writing per day. That's Intel's figures, and they are conservative (and probably out of date). A typical defrag will be an insignificant portion of that 20Gb. The more frequently it's run the less writes it will do. But in any case the SSD controller will defeat most of the writing that a defragging will do, because it detects that nothing has actually changed. And that assumes that the OS doesn't just pretend it's finished without actually doing anything at all.

The reason for not defragging SSDs is that it's a waste of time, not because it has any significant impact on the life of the drive.

johnwhelan · Mar 1, 2015

BuilderBob said:
No. And that's not what I said. I said that the impact of defragmenting on the life of the drive is insignificant.

If a typical drive has a life of five years then it supports about 20GB of writing per day. That's Intel's figures, and they are conservative (and probably out of date). A typical defrag will be an insignificant portion of that 20Gb. The more frequently it's run the less writes it will do. But in any case the SSD controller will defeat most of the writing that a defragging will do, because it detects that nothing has actually changed. And that assumes that the OS doesn't just pretend it's finished without actually doing anything at all.

The reason for not defragging SSDs is that it's a waste of time, not because it has any significant impact on the life of the drive.

So in summation we are in agreement that defragging an SSD is not recommended, and that it has little or no impact on performance. We appear not to be in agreement about the life of an SSD being dependent on the number of writes made to the drive, you appear to be saying it is irrelevant and the drive manufactures and myself feel it is relevant so we can agree to disagree on this point.

Cheerio John

LNERlover5 · Mar 1, 2015

johnwhelan said:
So in summation we are in agreement that defragging an SSD is not recommended, and that it has little or no impact on performance. We appear not to be in agreement about the life of an SSD being dependent on the number of writes made to the drive, you appear to be saying it is irrelevant and the drive manufactures and myself feel it is relevant so we can agree to disagree on this point.

There is nothing to gain performance wise from defragmenting, only additional writes which do count towards the finite write cycles a drive is capable of, which with current drives is quite a high figure. I think that's a reasonable conclusion.

Back to the original question. Yes, there are real gains in performance to be had when reading from an SSD. Likewise writing data improves in much the same way. The only present drawback is cost and capacities, which will improve in the future like all technologies do.

Jack.

BuilderBob · Mar 1, 2015

johnwhelan said:
you appear to be saying it is irrelevant and the drive manufactures and myself feel it is relevant so we can agree to disagree on this point.

Please stop changing my words. I did not use the term irrelevant. I said that defragging has an insignificant impact on the life of the drive. Whether that impact is relevant or not depends on the circumstances - it is quite possible that in some unusual situation such a tiny effect is relevant, although I can't think of one at the moment. You seem to be assuming that drive life is largely dictated by the number of writes that can be performed, and with modern drives that simply isn't the case. Manufacturers generally will not make comment about defragging, which you might assume indicates that they regard it as irrelevant, although I would not jump to that conclusion myself.

gratton20 · Mar 5, 2015

Just an update on my original post. I got myself the cheap ssd I mentioned (ebuyer 250G)and followed an online procedure to "clone" Windows to it. It sounded scary but it was so easy even a non techie like me could do it! I then copied my Trainz folder straight to the new ssd as you guys said I could and then wiped the original hard drive and put all my data files onto it from the backup I had made. I installed all my programs and few "casual" games on the ssd and now the system is really fast. It boots to Windows in about 20 seconds. Trainz runs a little better, there is no obvious stutter on big routes but to buy an ssd just to run Trainz would not, in my opinion, be worth the cost. However the increase in speed of Windows loading, launching progs etc is amazing. Worth every penny.

JCitron · Mar 5, 2015

That's great. I'm glad you are seeing the difference.

The timing of some things can be perfect and pertinent to a conversation sometimes, here's an article from today on PC Mag all about hard drives and SSDs.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,281...DA32A3D108AD9880AC4CB02083?mailing_id=1185015

John

gratton20 · Mar 6, 2015

Thanks for bringing that article to my attention John - Its very interesting.

SSD drive for TRS2012 - Worth the cost?

LNERlover5

Average Grad

johnwhelan

Well-known member

LNERlover5

Average Grad

BuilderBob

New member

johnwhelan

Well-known member

LNERlover5

Average Grad

BuilderBob

New member

gratton20

Member

JCitron

Trainzing since 12-2003

gratton20

Member

Similar threads