SSD burning through extreme amount of writes

since disabling Hibernate my usage has dropped by 50% - back on track for 4-5TB a year - a friend who also has a 850 EVO reports that his usage averages 12Gb per day on Windows 10 using it for 4-5 hours..so Im happy with that.

when its idle it seems to be writing constantly between 9KB/s and 25KB/s (each process)
- $LogFile (NTFS Volume Log)
- $MFT (Master File Table)
- wfpdiag.wpl
- NTuser.DAT.log1
- SOFTWARE.LOG2
- Wifi.etl
+ lots of Windows Store files / evtx files

I have Opera Portable running from and caching in RAMdrive, I can stream 1080p in youtube for an hour and not have any significant SSD writes..but it does use about 100MB an hour idling, soon as I start using Firefox (even just having it open) write usage spikes.

I have a new problem however - program Sanity Check is reporting that name spoofing is happening which is indicative of Malware...the filename is Memory Compression?? but ive scanned with all reputable scanners (9 of them) inc. rootkit scanners etc and nothing can be found, Sanity check even says it cannot locate the file on disk, so I think its an FP picking up W10's built in Memory Compression... but heres the thing...ive ran it before and its not said this?
- there were some updates installed 3 days ago and its been since then its been reporting it

I think I might go for a fresh install TBH, this one is 2 years old and has over 100 installs (music production application installs for the most part), has had a few outages...so it might be corrupted.
 
Even at 25kb/s continuous writes, that's only 751gb a year at 24/7 usage. Hardly anything to worry about.

Even having your web browser cache run in RAM is probably overkill. I think the sleeping of your PC was the main issue with the hybrid sleep. I always turn it off after a new install with 'powercfg -h off' in the command prompt.

Hopefully the fresh install solves your problems.
 
@ moogle - yeah looks that way, I dunno WHEN im gunna re-install it as its a big job with all the updates and app installs, but it defo needs doing

I looked at that page Blackale supplied and basically EVO's are good for around 2,000 P/E cycles (ive used 193) and PROs are good for 6000 P/E cycles (double the rate of older PLANAR 2D NAND for both drives)

to work out how long your drive will last with writes the math is this: (ballpark)

EVO = double the capacity, change from GB to TB...thats its expected and observed lifespan
PRO = Times the capacity by 6 and change from GB to TB and thats its expected and observed lifespan

250GB EVO = 500TB writes (20GB per day for 23 years)
256Gb PRO = 1500TB writes (20Gb per day for 69 years)
these arent exact 'to-the-nail' - just ballpark figures
Lifespan with 20GiB of Host Writes per Day with 1.5x Write Amplification

Ive checked my SMART data and the WLC (Wear Levelling Count) is now 93% down from 100% and P/E (Raw Value on WLC) is 139 - so ive used 139 P/E of the expected 2000 (filled the drive 139 times over)

so guess I aint got much too worry about :)
 
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Also remember sleeping your pc copies whatever is in the memory to the ssd to the hiberfil file.. I have disabled mine from chucking the data from the memory onto to the ssd when putting my pc to sleep.

It does this so,, if you have a powercut while your pc is asleep, it pulls the data off the ssd/hdd instead off the memory, when you resume windows, as the memory will be wiped after a powercut. I use a UPS, so I dont really need the feature enabled anyway.
 
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Phil2008 said:
Also remember sleeping your pc copies whatever is in the memory to the ssd to the hiberfil file.. I have disabled mine from chucking the data from the memory onto to the ssd when putting my pc to sleep.

It does this so,, if you have a powercut while your pc is asleep, it pulls the data off the ssd/hdd instead off the memory, when you resume windows, as the memory will be wiped after a powercut. I use a UPS, so I dont really need the feature enabled anyway.
Click to expand...

I know I said earlier on that this was a big hit... but even since disabling it AND using Opera portable installed in and caching in a RAMdrive Im still using 50GB a week (18TB a year)!! Computer is on most the day but only web browsing and some youtube

- Ive observed both Task Manager (Performance./Disks) and Resource Monitor and when I stream on KODI (installed on HDD), or YouTube in Opera it does NOT use any writes for those, it seems that any video streams are directed straight into RAM and aren't cached to disk, ive noticed (and observed on other forums) that Windows 8 and 10 do excessive writes to the system constantly, its writing logs for the most part, if i close all my programs and leave it IDLE it can clock up to 200MB an hour writes!...

I think I might be going back to Windows 7 which did not have this issue.

check your task manager under Disks, click on C drive 0 and watch it write its heart away at the bottom, it will say ZERO for few seconds then write anywhere between 4KB and 400KB of data every few seconds

When i search online there are lots of other people who have spotted it.

Now for those that say "well your drive is still going to last a good few years yet"..it's besides the point, I dont want some buggy software constantly writing to my drive just because its got issue.

The more applications you have open, the more it writes too the disk when idle, chrome and firefox are really bad for amplifying writes when idle, just while typing this reply and checking it its jumped up 200MB

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Umm well all I have turned off, is the sleep thing, defrag scheduler and unchecked the "allow files on this drive to have contents indexed" in the c drive properties.

Ive had my SSD since may 9th 2013 and I haven't really been careful with it at all, and always have used firefox for my internet browser. But saying all of that, I have only started using windows 10 since November 2016

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@ Moogle - sorry yes I was wrong, I multiplied it by 365 lol - my previous usage before I disabled HIBS and used cached Opera was 43GB per day average over the years Ive had it (32TB over 2 years = average of 43GB per day) - so its nice to see my yearly usage now be around 2-3TB which is what most other people get (rather than 16TB average).

@ Phil - I have done the same tweaks as you and my drive is also 2 years old and im up to 33.2TB in writes, but as I said previously a large margin of this has been HIBS every time I slept the PC (and it would sleep itself after 5 minutes which happened a lot while i was doing other things while it was turned on).

have you checked your Task Manager too see if it constantly writes?

its just annoying that it does, ive even used a cortana uninstall program, disabled Live Tiles and Something else (cant remember) through GPedit & it still does it - also, through using WinDirStats I found there were 25GB used up in just 5 files in this folder:

C:\Users\(user)\AppData\Local\Packages\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\AC\Comms

all file-names have really long HexiDecimal names and unknown file type, im certain they are related, i moved them to the HDD to recouperate space, no problems yet, the only thing is with uninstalling Cortana it removed the search functionality completely....which I didnt want (I did have inedxing disabled though) - so i have to locate CMD.exe now to make a shortcut for it so I can run it elevated, luckily all other usefull tools i already pinned to start
 
I have just checked my task manager, and it seems to be writing a few k every few secs, Im guessing thats for log files and wot not. I couldnt tell you if win7 was the same as win10 as I havent ever thought of looking till now.

2tb a year isnt bad and my ssd has written about that every yr, if its 8tb writes now. So Im not going to wrorry to much about it, I hope. Anyway its a tad tough as win7 hasn't directx12, so I couldn't really go back to win7 even if I wanted to:mad:

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Win7 used to do the same. Back then I had junction links setup for it to write onto my HDD but it's just general stuff like event logs and data WIndows can't afford to lose in the case of a power cut. If you start worrying about those little things you'll go mad about trying to protect your SSD. Even Firefox I've gotten used to having it write all the time.
 
moogle said:
Win7 used to do the same. Back then I had junction links setup for it to write onto my HDD but it's just general stuff like event logs and data WIndows can't afford to lose in the case of a power cut. If you start worrying about those little things you'll go mad about trying to protect your SSD. Even Firefox I've gotten used to having it write all the time.
Click to expand...

I think the main 2 that does the most harm to ssd's is the scheduler in the defrag (as I think defrag might defrag my ssd if I let it) and the hiberfil.sys file if you sleep your pc. But other then disabling these 2 things, just use your pc as normal and stop wrorrying.... Plus it cant do windows much good stopping/disabling things either.
 
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Defrag detects if you're using an SSD ( I think in Windows 7 you had to disable it) and performs TRIM instead of a defrag on a SSD drive on Win 8 and up. So that's not a huge issue anymore, but yeah the hibernation is one to watch out for, I just turn it off straight after a new build. Indexing is another that causes a lot of writing so you can set the file attribute to not index files on your SSD or turn off indexing totally. But you're right if you start fiddling too much Windows starts to break a bit.
 
So it wont defrag my c drive, I thought TRIM was apart of the software in the SSD and had nothing todo with with windows?

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moogle said:
It detects it as a Solid State Disk so it will send the TRIM command when it runs and when files are deleted.

I'm not sure but the SSD controller does its own garbage collection, TRIM is seperate to that and is the command from the OS to the SSD.

Some interesting reading material here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx
Click to expand...

I took your word for it, plus did some research on the net ... and I clicked optimise c drive. You were right, it ran the TRIM thing, I dont think it did much though as it ran like for 2secs, then it was done. Thanks for that.;)
 
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Phil2008 said:
I took your word for it, plus did some research on the net ... and I clicked optimise c drive. You were right, it ran the TRIM thing, I dont think it did much though as it ran like for 2secs, then it was done. Thanks for that.;)
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No probs

YEah I think Windows also performs it whilst the PC is idle (so as not to hinder performance whilst you're using the drive), so it can keep it pretty clear, which is why it didn't have much to do in your case (probably same for me too!).

But if you've not given it a rest to clean up then thats where that scheduled 'defrag' will catch all of it, and optimise to bring it back to speed again. You should be fine for everyday use, I've never had to manually optimise :)
 
snadge;30460536 said:
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
Click to expand...

Yes, Win 10. And I hibernate multiple times a day.
 
I dont know like for me, I backed up, updated and cleaned everything out on the 1st.. I had 92.1gb used and now 8 days later, I now have 91.6gb. I can more or less say thats mainly firefox files because I should get most of that back when I delete the firefox temp files.

Since the 6th of feb the total writes were 8.2tb and its stlll 8.2tb today.

If you can still use hibernate, you haven't disabled the hiberfil.sys file.. also how large is your pagefile, I have set mine both min and max to 4gb, because it sets its self to the memory you have installed if you let it?
 
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