SSD burning through extreme amount of writes

snadge

snadge

snadge

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11 Oct 2010
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551
Hi

after realising my 250Gb Samsung 850 EVO had used a ludicrous 32TB worth of writes in 2 years I started to monitor my usage (given that most people are saying after 2 years they only have 5-6Gb and my old 840 EVO that I gave away only accumulated 4Tb in 1 year).

In the last 16 days my average daily writes have been 31.25GB ... I just cant get my head around that! I do watch a lot of YouTube and Stream a film at least once per day, I think my router had something like 160Gb usage since last reboot and that was roughly about 3 weeks or so back...

BUT....

Since I noticed the heavy amount of writes a couple of weeks back I moved my streaming app KODI too the HDD in the hope it would cache there, also I moved Firefox's cache into a RAMdisk, again hoping this would limit writes to my drive, so how the heck am I using 31Gb of writes per day?? thats 11Tb per year, im sure there is something not right here...? YES Im a heavy user spending several hours a day on the PC, but nearly all of it is web-browsing with some Youtube and Streaming, and like I say I moved KODI to the HDD and Firefox Cache to RAM yet I still have the same high amount of writes being used ...I can only assume that all web traffic must traverse onto the SSD somehow before being sent to its location (such as RAM for firefox and HDD for KODI)

I need to get this sorted otherwise this drive aint gunna last very long, I know tests have shown the 840 EVO to reach 300TB before it got any issues and 800TB before it stopped the OS from working, but this was the 840 EVO, I dont know how the 3D NAND will affect the write endurance compared to an 840 EVO, Samsung rated the 850 EVO for 75TB or 5-Year Warranty, well it looks like I might hit 75TB at around the 5 year mark at this rate...

can anyone help me try and pin down what exactly is going on? I have my system optimized for SSD usage?

I have 86Gb Free and have 10% assigned to OP, write performance has slightly dipped since i got the drive too...not too much but AS SSD tests sometimes get 950-1000, when I got it new it was consistently hitting 1080, the read Latency seems have increased too from 0.040 to 0.120, but write latency is the same as it ever was at 0.040

thanks
 
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well after 1 hour of installing SSD life it reports 2.5GB of writes!!! and ALL i was doing was using Firefox to research this issue across 5 Tabs - some says its the restore.js file being written every 15 seconds and some people changed it to 1 hour.... then i read that its actually cookie file thats the cause, apparently chrome has the same issue

I wonder if Opera has?

Yoric
September 23, 2016 at 8:34 am

Hi, I’m one of the Firefox developers who was in charge of Session Restore, so I’m one of the culprits of this heavy SSD I/O. To make a long story short: we are aware of the problem, but fixing it for real requires completely re-architecturing Session Restore. That’s something we haven’t done yet, as Session Restore is rather safety-critical for many users, so this would need to be done very carefully, and with plenty of manpower.
Click to expand...
 
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what is you drive health/life remaining?
also under win 10 , task manager, users tab, shows disk usage
my ssd usage, 433days powered 5.5Tb written,97% health, firefox between 5-10 tabs plus edge running


can anyone help me try and pin down what exactly is going on?
I think my router had something like 160Gb usage since last reboot and that was roughly about 3 weeks or so back
 
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Open resource monitor and sort your disk writes in ascending order to see what is being written to. Firefox won't write that much even though it's always writing profile data.

As mentioned by nutcase, could be the pagefile, or do you hibernate the PC quite often?
 
I use Hibernate yes, maybe twice per day... hmmm thanks for pointing that out to me, should have seen that myself duh! thats the good thing about communitys :)

mind I did get 2.6Gb of writes from FF in 1 hour just researching this issue, no vids, 6 or 7 Tabs of various pages I was reading..

i experiemented usin SSDlife as my measuring tool

Opera open idle with 5 tabs used less then 0.1Gb but how much I dont know
Firefox open idle with same 5 tabs used 0.2Gb...both 1 hour tests

I just watched TV and left it

right, I should use SLEEP then and see how I get on

does anyone know roughly how much energy an Ivy Bridge i5 with Gigabyte H77M-D3H mobo, XFX Pro Core PSU 450watt, 8Gb RAM & GTX 650 would use in sleep?

thanks for opening my eyes, of course i have it set to hibernate after 5 or 10 minutes, that would write 8Gb each time yes? and there have been times when im reading something or just nipped downstairs that its gone to sleep "hibernated" and ive had to wake it.. I chose HIBS to save money on power...but..it still uses power in HIBS as my USB still outputs power to controller n charges my phone

I will continue to monitor use WITHOUT HIBS and report back

thanks

edit: it reports 100% life, 8 years remaining, 32Tb written and 10,566 hours on, powered on 2055 times
 
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I doubt it is firefox - I used it as much as anyone and probably a lot heavier than most and I've only done just over 16TB worth of writes on my SSD in 3.5 years - a large chunk of that due to an early ShadowPlay beta that did a lot of writes with the temporarily files and more recently a bug with Spotify where it was writing like 1TB a month for about 6 months until they fixed it.
 
...actually Ive checked and its set to sleep not HIB...but i HIB every night... so thats 8Gb accounted for the 31Gb... that leaves 23Gb per day... seems browsing heavy on firefox is still costly on writes, theres plenty of evidence to support it, even a firefox coder has admitted they are working on it
 
yeah hibernate will write the size of your ram to disk. would be nice if it only wrote what was used.

I had a spreadsheet to track my writes per day and show the lifetime. I think 10gb per day was the norm on my windows drive.
 
Actually, not every-night I hibernate, I do if I go out though... i go to bed watching a stream, I just turn off my TV and it SLEEPS the PC after the movie is finished, unless sleep is actually hibernating?

I will do the same with the spreadsheet, Ive disabled HIBS and I will continue to use Firefox for a few days, record usage, then I will use Opera for same 2 days and see what/if theres any difference, but like I say my Firefox cache is also in RAMdisk, so writes should be minimal for it?? Opera cache is on the SSD

a link provided above by someone else allowed me to find out that loads of others spotted this issue just before Xmas, a Mozilla coder responsible for session_restore.js came onto the thread and said he was responsible for it and they know about the heavy I/O Firefox produces and that they are working on it, but it will take a complete remake of the architecture for it.. something like that, links below.. I read all 5 pages and it seemed that it was cookies file was dumping as much writes. On my system with 6 Tabs open its writing constantly to cookies.sq at 15KB/s - this is only 54MB per hour (mind i did change session_restore interval from 15 seconds to 1 hour..im changing this back now)

thing is ive used chrome for 90% of the 2 years Ive been using the drive, and even people on that thread report the same issue with chrome, one guy in particular was testing using Process Explorer monitoring and log feature to record writes in idle states and he was getting crazy numbers, quite a few people were able to reproduce his tests and get the same results.

threads: HERE and in more depth HERE
 
Check if you have hybrid sleep enabled -- it basically writes out the hibernate file before going to sleep, in case you lose power while asleep, it can come back from hibernation.
 
rotor said:
Check if you have hybrid sleep enabled -- it basically writes out the hibernate file before going to sleep, in case you lose power while asleep, it can come back from hibernation.
Click to expand...

Ive disabled HIBS in PowerCFG, so it cant be used, only sleep or shutdown, I followed a guide to create a shortcut for sleep then HOTKEY (CTRL+ALT+Z) to sleep it, but doesnt work, already at 8.1Gb for the day so far
 
Open Task Manager, select Details, then right-click on one of the column headers (e.g. Status or Username), select Select Columns, scroll down and select I/O write bytes. Now sort by that column (so that the biggest one is at the top).
 
Also, there's a known issue with Firefox and with the Spotify app.

Is there any chance you have a virus? And also: are you one of those people that tinkers with their PC to within an inch of its life, or is your Windows configuration standard (i.e. no "reg hacks", no windows accelerator utilities that you always run on your fresh installs)?
 
no virus, i dont use dodgy sites and have Avira installed and have scanned with Kaspersky, Emsisoft & MalwareBytes...nothing, Im quite good with windows PC's, never had an infection in over 10 years

I dont use spotify either

I have managed to get my writes down though - yesterday I used just 9Gb (compared to my average of 31Gb) but this is using firefox with a RAM cache - think most of it was HIBS, since disabling this its dropped dramatically... but also, since picking up on it and spending a lot of time in the resource monitor, Ive come to notice that Windows 10 is very active when idle, HxStore.exe (the Store im assuming) is almost constantly writing a 15-25KB/s, but so is quite a few other things (cortana was one which ive uninstalled as I have no use for it).. Ive also put Opera Portable in my RAMdrive but I cant get it too default for URL:HTTP - so when I click links in Mail app it will open in Opera portable, when you go to change this setting it does not allow you to BROWSE for an application and only allows you to choose from installed Applications.

heres a screenshot from Resource Monitor after letting it sit idle for 5 minutes, as you can see from the graph even at idle with no browser open it still writes constantly - every second the write amounts change for the top 5 or 6 items - this screenshot was the LOWEST i could get it down too...

when i used windows 7 on an 840 EVO I only used 4Tb in just over 1 year - now with Cortana off, HIBS off and Firefox cache in RAM I seem to be managing 10-15Gb a day now which is around 4-5TB per year, Firefox still likes to sap up writes quite a bit even with the cache in the RAM... hence me wanting to use Opera (not 'yet' known to have the session_restore or cookies heavy dump issue like Firefox and Chrome) but I cant set it as default from links... just for HTML files, for default from links you need to set URL:HTTP and you can only do that with installed apps as I say, I even tried setting it to an Installed version of Opera and changing its shortcut to point to the one in the RAM drive but that didnt work, it still opened the install on SSD (meaning its using SSD cache)..if anyone knows of a CMD command that can force it I would be grateful

tvbORVU.jpg
 
Skiddley said:
Just looked, and my 500Gig 850 Pro that is also 2yrs old had totaled 19.5TB.
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windows 10?

i just went out for couple of hours and left the pc idling with no browser open and it was at 7.7gb, when i came back it was at 8gb used for today!! 300MB of writes doing nothing for few hours! tiny firewall running, av disabled, winpatrol, share-x are the only apps open

checking resource monitor its SYSTEM using up writes
 
nope - but according to Sanity Check a process is spoofing its name, i have ran scans with MalwareBytes (threat scan) , Emsisoft (threat scan), Anti-rootkit, Kaspersky (full scan) and nothing is found??

also Kaspersky dumped a TON load of writes at the end of the scan in a temp folder (was watching it in RM), now at 20.1GB for the day and this was just from a few virus scans and using Opera...up from 8Gb so far for the day when i got in couple hours ago

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Analysis
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Analyzing your system ...

Processes with obfuscated names have been detected

One or more processes are doing efforts of spoofing their names so that they appear as innocent standard processes. This is a typical sign of malware at work.


The process memory compression is reporting a fake name.

Information about the responsible process memory compression:

file path:
This file is no longer available. We suggest you try to find this file in another location on your hard disk.
Click here to do a Google search on memory compression

Processes are running without company, product and description information

One or more processes have been detected which have not registered any company, product and description information. This is not uncommon or necessarily the work of a virus or malware but does raise a flag of suspicion. It is suggested that you find out what this process belongs to and why it is running on your system.


The process memory compression does not have any product, company or description information.

Information about the responsible process memory compression:

file path:
This file is no longer available. We suggest you try to find this file in another location on your hard disk.
Click here to do a Google search on memory compression






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Conclusion
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Irregularites have been detected which are typically the work of malware. We suggest that you locate the above mentioned files and do a search on them with Google for finding solutions to the detected problems. Possibly a virus scanner may be able to remove these problems but you can be only completely sure about a clean system if you format your harddrive and reinstall Windows from the original CD.

As always, we suggest you use a good antivirus scanner which does not make use of any controversial techniques and always practice caution when downloading files and opening email attachments.

Note that is is not always possible to make a clear distinction between malware and legitimate products. This is because certain legitimate products resort to agressive controversial techniques as an anti-piracy measure, to avoid debugging or for anti-competetive purposes. Antivirus or other security software may be making use of rootkit-like techniques in an attempt to hide itself from malware. Worse, such products may be involved in a controversial race along the lines of "defeat evil with its own weapons".
Click to expand...
 
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