SSDs being destroyed by writes

xiphrex · 5 May 2010 at 16:54

Hi guys,

Valve recently updated their Steam platform to utilise a new UI and in doing so have made steam constantly write to the hard drive. We dont know if its a bug yet but knowing valve I dont think it is.

Then someone in the bug post on their forums said this: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14767164&postcount=62

Same issue here! ~ 10 writes per second. I have an SSD so these writes are killing my drive. Unacceptable.

I have bought a new SSD and I was going to put windows and programs on it, including steam, but now I am worried.

Is he right about the writes killing the HD?

Just FYI, I have left the PC and steam on for 6 days and 19 hours and the number of I/O writes it has made is 1.6 million - would this mere 6 days of usage really damage my SSD?

VaderDSL · 5 May 2010 at 16:57

I don't think damaging is the right term. SSDs have a limit on how many times it can be written to. So while it won't damage the SSD constant writes may reduce the life span of the drive, but then I've heard that a typical drive should last several years of fairly high usage.

smee · 5 May 2010 at 16:58

If your that worried suggest you move your steam folder to another drive.

Broken Hope · 5 May 2010 at 17:26

I'm pretty sure the OS is doing way more than 10 writes per second, man some people are too paranoid about their SSD's life span.

apatia77 · 5 May 2010 at 17:27

Wasn't it about 100gb per day for about 10 years or something like that? It's a lot of data and many years of usage.

Rroff · 5 May 2010 at 17:36

I'm not seeing it here... my OS disc (that steam is installed on) has around 0.2 write/s on average with or without steam loaded and my SSDs that have some of my steam games on (via fs links) has 0 write/s unless I'm playing one of the games thats on them.

NathanE · 5 May 2010 at 19:28

Write caching / delayed writes / lazy writing (features that all modern general purpose OSes have) will mean that the vast majority of those writes are coalesced into a single I/O operation on the hard disk (or SSD).

Process Explorer and Process Monitor are tools for professionals. They are liable to scare people they weren't intended for.

AbsenceJam · 5 May 2010 at 21:41

NathanE said:
Write caching / delayed writes / lazy writing (features that all modern general purpose OSes have) will mean that the vast majority of those writes are coalesced into a single I/O operation on the hard disk (or SSD).

Process Explorer and Process Monitor are tools for professionals. They are liable to scare people they weren't intended for.

Task Manager too?

Simon42 · 6 May 2010 at 18:19

Unless you are using an Enterprise level SSD then it's certainly worth considering SSD live expectancy, but unfortunately it's all too easy for people to get overly concerned.

I usually suggest using the drives SMART data to watch the media wear indicator and host writes over a period of time. If the figures show excessive writes/wear then other tools such as Process Monitor can be used to identify the culprit(s). If someone asks me how to know if the SMART data is showing excessive writes then I don't suggest they try the next step at all

Broken Hope · 6 May 2010 at 20:26

Just to back up what NathanE said, this is from the steam thread from one of the steam developers.

The write counter you guys are viewing is not physical writes (ie, actual writes to disk) but logical writes, ie, individual write operations to memory, which will be later flushed to disk. Some of these ios are also to memory mapped files, and very very few of the ios are immediate writes with buffering disabled. As such many of the logical writes are buffered into a single delayed physical write to the disk hardware. Steam isn't going to be killing your SSD disks any time soon.

Muel · 7 May 2010 at 13:30

I think everyone is being way too paranoid about SSD life. Do you really believe that the manufacturers would put out products with a life span shorter than that which the average user will use it for?

daz · 7 May 2010 at 13:32

Even if you're writing at a constant 1MB/s of small writes, I think the life time is ~5 years.

NinjaCool · 7 May 2010 at 17:34

Steam was updated today and among the changes were;

-Decreased frequency of some background update checks to decrease the frequency of clientregistry.blob access

Memphis · 7 May 2010 at 17:47

Gotta love paranoid geeks that think they know what they're talking about, but really don't

.

GJ02 · 7 May 2010 at 17:48

smee said:
If your that worried suggest you move your steam folder to another drive.

as i have done since getting a ssd

having a steam folder on my ssd was out of the question as its only 40 gig and my steam folder is close to 25

Simon42 · 7 May 2010 at 20:29

Muel said:
I think everyone is being way too paranoid about SSD life. Do you really believe that the manufacturers would put out products with a life span shorter than that which the average user will use it for?

Well the problem is determining what is average. I am a developer and have found a couple of applications that make 100+ times the write bytes of all the other applications on my PCs, which could be a problem.

In both cases I have reported issues with detailed logs and diagnostics to the companies and they have now released updates which greatly reduce the writes. I have always ensured my own software doesn't write excessively, not just for SSD use, but for general performance. SSDs have been a wake up call for some developers that have written software which makes excessive writes and often avoids write caching or forces the OS buffers to be flushed.

So yes some people are paranoid about their SSDs life, but it's certainly not something for the more technically aware to ignore altogether.