Are there wear problems from partitioning a SSD?

[Ferather]

6% wear for ~46TB over 7-8 years.

----

In terms of unallocated, I did some research before making my partitions, and I have 140mb unallocated MSR, not sure if that's relevant at all.

My original partition layout for the SSD and Windows was the following:


GPT

480mb - NTFS, label: Recovery
280mb - Fat32, label: EFI
140mb - Unallocated, MSR, label: Reserved

40.02gb (40981mb), NTFS, label: Windows
408.02gb (417813mb) NTFS, label: Master
16.84gb (17245mb) NTFS, label: Page


Still much the same now, but as secondary:

 

[ThrashZone]

People aren't gunna learn if they don't ask questions and get answers

Hi,
Guessing you missed the /end of thread bit kudos for that and all others that keep commenting

 

[chrcoluk]

This document by Intel explains some basics and also has some calculations for Intel drives. Basically, any free space within a partition is as good as unpartitioned (=guaranteed to be always free) space. As long as you're able to keep ~20% of total drive space free, most of the time, you're good, and you gain a lot of endurance. Most of the time doesn't even mean all of the time, so you can still do some large transfers that fill up all of the drive occasionally.

Edit: even on spindles it's not 1 to 1. The difference is that the mapping doesn't change every day, it only does when the drive finds new bad sectors.

Thats true, I never said you had to leave it unpartitioned, but various manufacturers still reccomend doing so. Probably because people can accidently use free space easily.

 

[Mussels]

~10TB writes in 6 years is like a drop in the endurance bucket though.

There are drives with really low TBW lifespan these days, which would be scary for anyone except users like that
I found some new drives for sale right now, with only 40TBW. Sad to think i'd kill that drive in 1-2 years with just windows and steam.

Mine are at 55TBW (1TB) and 32TBW (2TB, newer) - I'm not a heavy user, that's just like 3 years and 1.5 years as OS and gaming drives

Hi,
Guessing you missed the /end of thread bit kudos for that and all others that keep commenting

So uh, why are you in charge of that?
You aren't a moderator, or the OP of the thread - and you're giving out incorrect terrible advice that's not based in reality whatsoever.
Take some time out to reflect on the attitude, before it's forced on you.

 

[Wirko]

/end of thread means end of end of thread, I'm fine with that
./endofthread, as it was originally put, means ... something scary in Linux?

I found some new drives for sale right now, with only 40TBW.

What capacity? Also, do they look at least half-legit, judging by things like price/TB?

 

[delshay]

I just want to point out some older Samsung SSD are still under warranty despite it's age. Do they still offer 10+ year warranty in the year 2022?

 

[lexluthermiester]

/end of thread means end of end of thread, I'm fine with that
./endofthread, as it was originally put, means ... something scary in Linux?


What capacity? Also, do they look at least half-legit, judging by things like price/TB?

You're picking a fight with a moderator when no one said anything to you. You want to not do that. Just throwing it out there...

 

[Valantar]

There are drives with really low TBW lifespan these days, which would be scary for anyone except users like that
I found some new drives for sale right now, with only 40TBW. Sad to think i'd kill that drive in 1-2 years with just windows and steam.

Mine are at 55TBW (1TB) and 32TBW (2TB, newer) - I'm not a heavy user, that's just like 3 years and 1.5 years as OS and gaming drives

Wait, what? What capacities are those 40TBW drives? That sounds scary low indeed - but remember that it's a lot harder to write that much data to a lower capacity drive in the first place, as the overhead over "files that are always there" on a system install is much lower. If they're 256GB or something, I wouldn't be worried even by that rating.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Wait, what? What capacities are those 40TBW drives?

Low end QLC based drives.

 

[Valantar]

Low end QLC based drives.

I did a quick skim across cheap QLC drives on Newegg, and while most didn't list TBW ratings, the lowest I saw were 512GB drives at ~170TBW. Now, I also discovered that 128GB QLC SSDs actually exist (ewwwww), and I can't imagine those having much of an endurance rating. But then again you wouldn't really be able to write that much to a 128GB drive anyway, so the point is mostly moot. On the other hand, if there are 512GB or above QLC drives with endurance raitings that low, I'd treat them as WORM drives, and definitely not use them as a system drive. They can't be that much cheaper than a cheap TLC drive.

 

[P4-630]

Do they still offer 10+ year warranty in the year 2022?

No, all of them including the Pro SSD/NVMe's are now 5 years warranty only.

 

[delshay]

No, all of them including the Pro SSD/NVMe's are now 5 years warranty only.

You would think with all the improvement's over the years it will remain the same or better, but it's being cut in half. I wonder why, because this is a step backwards.

 

[P4-630]

You would think with all the improvement's over the years it will remain the same or better, but it's being cut in half. I wonder why, because this is a step backwards.

As far as I know the 2.5" 850 serie was the last with 10 years.
I still have an 850 Pro 512GB with 3d v-nand (MLC).

Samsung now only makes drives with 3d v-nand (TLC) or 3d v-nand (QLC).
The TLC comes with a 5 year warranty
The QLC comes with a 3 year warranty (the cheapest)

 

[lexluthermiester]

The TLC comes with a 5 year warranty
The QLC comes with a 3 year warranty (the cheapest)

This clearly shows a lack of confidence in QLC..

 

[P4-630]

This clearly shows a lack of confidence in QLC..

They are fine for game storage, I just wouldn't use them as OS drive with windows pagefile...

 

[ThrashZone]

So uh, why are you in charge of that?
You aren't a moderator, or the OP of the thread - and you're giving out incorrect terrible advice that's not based in reality whatsoever.
Take some time out to reflect on the attitude, before it's forced on you.

Hi,
Tad out of placement onemoar originally said it I just kudo'd for not listening to his statement
.

Not sure what terrible/ bad advise you're referring to either.

Hi,
All my os ssd's are this size
I do have some personal files like music/ images/ programs on them to so not all personal files are on different storage drives but back ups are.
None have out and out died except one linux mint killed long ago by never running trim on it seemed to be a crucial firmware bug clash with mint 17
Replacement mx100 256gb still works to this day.

I don't partition ssd's though beside a single system reserved in the front otherwise the rest spans except a little unallocated space at the end for the firmware to use for over provisioning

Can't be this

Hi,
Yep if you've ever used samsung magician and had it do the over improvising for you you'd see unallocated space after this is all the firmware needs.

I'll add the firmware also only needs zero activity to do it's work/ hibernation...

Or this

 

[lexluthermiester]

They are fine for game storage, I just wouldn't use them as OS drive with windows pagefile...

Sure, not a whole lot of data changing happens to a game install once installed. QLC drives make good and less expensive drives for data backups as well. Just not an OS/heavy use drive.

 

[Mussels]

This thread might have needed a cleanup, but any perceived grumpiness got sorted out via PM's
Let's keep things nice, we all seem to have different views on SSD's but seriously - there are garbage drives out there, and a lot of garbage information too. Things change in the SSD world, common knowledge from the SLC days means nothing on a QLC drive.

This thread has changed topic, because we got the answer to the OP's question (no) - but we're still discussing the actual concern of SSD wear


I'll summarise the entire mess below into: You can buy 1TB drives right now, that range from 1,200TBW to 80TBW.
I've only spent 15 minutes looking into this, i'm sure worse drives exist out there.




Smaller SSD's are at the highest risk of more TBW, because the simple fact of running out of room means you need to delete things and likely re-create them later. Even automated windows tasks like the page file behave this way, with greater storage space helping alleviate re-writes.


I wrote some big annoyed rant a while back about samsungs naming scheme and how a 980 pro has half the TLC of a 970 pro - and every new release (evo, evo plus, evo plus plus, whatever - was it the SD cards that did that?) was fairly consistent, until now when it smashed backwards.

Wait, what? What capacities are those 40TBW drives? That sounds scary low indeed - but remember that it's a lot harder to write that much data to a lower capacity drive in the first place, as the overhead over "files that are always there" on a system install is much lower. If they're 256GB or something, I wouldn't be worried even by that rating.

Modern SSD's went backwards in TBW, fast. Theres a lot of 250GB and under drives with low TBW's and some brands that refuse to even advertise them, and give you "hours" instead.

Lower capacity drives often have more writes, not less - a PC gamer is going to delete games to install a new one far more times than a user who installs and leaves it there.
Deleting to free up space, only to re-create is the worst case scenario here.




From here on i'm only comparing NVME drives that are for sale today.
Ranked in order of samsung as reference, then best to worst.

Keep in mind, these are considered the top tier premium drives by manu

Sticking to just the 1TB models since every series has them:
980 Pro: 600
980: 600
970 pro: 1200
970 Evo plus: 600
970 evo: 600

980 (regular)

Evo plus range:

970 evo range

What about their QLC range, well known for being cheap, at the reduction of lifespan?

360TBW. Honestly, it's low but it's not terrible - and they get much more reasonable on the bigger models.

So if samsung, the king of consumer gaming SSD's are going backwards (the 980 series) what about other brands?


Team MP34:
Huh. That's actually impressive.

XPG's SX8200 Pro?
Not so bad, on par with samsung.

Crucial P2 series:
Basically, halve samsungs. Except for the 970 pro, quarter that.

Kingston's NV1 range:
Oh, making crucial look good here.

WD green? Oh no. Oh fuck no. 80 TBW for the TLC 960GB and 100TBW for 1TB and 2TB QLC

From 1200TBW to 80TBW.

In Sata SSD's, things are just depressing.
These are generally on par with small NVME drives, but you can imagine these drives would end up with data deleted and created far more often than bigger drives that can retain data easier
These 40TBW drives wouldn't last me as an OS drive for a year.

Kingston A400:

Crucial BX500:

WD dont even list the TBW for their WD green SATA drives, they know its so bad. They state "upto 1 million hours" instead for all drives

 

[Valantar]

This thread might have needed a cleanup, but any perceived grumpiness got sorted out via PM's
Let's keep things nice, we all seem to have different views on SSD's but seriously - there are garbage drives out there, and a lot of garbage information too. Things change in the SSD world, common knowledge from the SLC days means nothing on a QLC drive.

This thread has changed topic, because we got the answer to the OP's question (no) - but we're still discussing the actual concern of SSD wear


I'll summarise the entire mess below into: You can buy 1TB drives right now, that range from 1,200TBW to 80TBW.
I've only spent 15 minutes looking into this, i'm sure worse drives exist out there.




Smaller SSD's are at the highest risk of more TBW, because the simple fact of running out of room means you need to delete things and likely re-create them later. Even automated windows tasks like the page file behave this way, with greater storage space helping alleviate re-writes.


I wrote some big annoyed rant a while back about samsungs naming scheme and how a 980 pro has half the TLC of a 970 pro - and every new release (evo, evo plus, evo plus plus, whatever - was it the SD cards that did that?) was fairly consistent, until now when it smashed backwards.



Modern SSD's went backwards in TBW, fast. Theres a lot of 250GB and under drives with low TBW's and some brands that refuse to even advertise them, and give you "hours" instead.

Lower capacity drives often have more writes, not less - a PC gamer is going to delete games to install a new one far more times than a user who installs and leaves it there.
Deleting to free up space, only to re-create is the worst case scenario here.




From here on i'm only comparing NVME drives that are for sale today.
Ranked in order of samsung as reference, then best to worst.

Keep in mind, these are considered the top tier premium drives by manu
View attachment 257639


Sticking to just the 1TB models since every series has them:
980 Pro: 600
980: 600
970 pro: 1200
970 Evo plus: 600
970 evo: 600

980 (regular)
View attachment 257643

Evo plus range:
View attachment 257640

970 evo range
View attachment 257641

What about their QLC range, well known for being cheap, at the reduction of lifespan?

360TBW. Honestly, it's low but it's not terrible - and they get much more reasonable on the bigger models.
View attachment 257642

So if samsung, the king of consumer gaming SSD's are going backwards (the 980 series) what about other brands?


Team MP34:
Huh. That's actually impressive.
View attachment 257647

XPG's SX8200 Pro?
Not so bad, on par with samsung.
View attachment 257648

Crucial P2 series:
Basically, halve samsungs. Except for the 970 pro, quarter that.
View attachment 257644

Kingston's NV1 range:
Oh, making crucial look good here.
View attachment 257646

WD green? Oh no. Oh fuck no. 80 TBW for the TLC 960GB and 100TBW for 1TB and 2TB QLC

From 1200TBW to 80TBW.
View attachment 257645


In Sata SSD's, things are just depressing.
These are generally on par with small NVME drives, but you can imagine these drives would end up with data deleted and created far more often than bigger drives that can retain data easier
These 40TBW drives wouldn't last me as an OS drive for a year.

Kingston A400:
View attachment 257649

Crucial BX500:
View attachment 257650

WD dont even list the TBW for their WD green SATA drives, they know its so bad. They state "upto 1 million hours" instead for all drives

That's a bunch of useful info, thanks!

One objection though: I don't agree with smaller drives being prone to more writes as a general/linear rule. Why? Because as size goes down, they don't have room for further writes on top of the base software that stays installed at all times - whether that is an OS and basic software, or a game drive with the handful of games that are played regularly and kept. With current AAA game install sizes, larger SSDs also afford installing multiple large games in a way that simply isn't possible on a smaller drive even with deleting a lot of stuff. In short, this being a linear relation seems too simple to me. I would assume there's a kind of bell curve for SSD writes/lifetime, where the amplification due to space constraints that you describe most likely happens in the 500-1000GB range, but is unlikely to happen at 256GB, let alone 128GB - and a 2TB or larger drive might see a relatively lower amount of writes per capacity due to there being less need to delete stuff. Nobody running a 256GB SSD is going to regularly install 50+GB games, uninstall them soon after, and install another 50+GB game in their place. And if you're running a 128GB SSD, even as a game drive, you don't have the capacity to do a lot of writes at all, assuming you're not just stress testing the SSD with writes constantly.

Sadly all of my old low capacity drives are either in my NAS or hooked to consoles that don't allow for host writes to be read from them (why TrueNAS doesn't let you see total host writes though, that's weird), but my old 500GB 960 Evo system drive - which was paired with a 500GB SATA SSD as a game drive, but games were installed on both due to capacity - has seen ~31TB written since I bought it in late 2017, being used as a portable drive (with a not insignificant amount of writes) since I upgraded to a 2TB drive last year. That 2TB drive has seen 16TB written since April last year - and, of course, there's a big boost in writes early in a drive's lifetime. Normalizing for capacity, the 500GB drive has seen more writes/year than the 2TB drive (31/5/0.5 = 12.4 drive writes/year vs. 16/1.3/2 = 6.2), but in raw data the 2TB drive has seen ~2x the data written per year.

 

[Mussels]

In my gaming group we have two users with 240GB SSD's
Both have to uninstall one game, to fit another (Be it CoD, WoW, Ark, or whatever) - they're my insight into this.
They eventually go back, adding a whole extra set of (large) writes that a bigger drive would never have had to do

You're using NAS drives in a NAS, which isn't exactly the same thing as windows or games drives, where a user has to make regular decisions about deleting A to fit B, and then deleting B to fit C or go back to A

I do agree it's only a potential situation, but as it's one i hear about regularly from those two gamers it does come to mind as a problem

One of them regularly downloads shows to his SSD, watches, deletes - and then rewatches a week or two later. He's managed to kill three WD greens this year alone, because he simply can't accept torrenting to it is sheer madness.

 

[Valantar]

In my gaming group we have two users with 240GB SSD's
Both have to uninstall one game, to fit another (Be it CoD, WoW, Ark, or whatever) - they're my insight into this.
They eventually go back, adding a whole extra set of (large) writes that a bigger drive would never have had to do

I get that, but how often does that happen, and does that cancel out the "Sure, I've got room for this game too" effect of higher capacity drives? And, the lower capacity you go, the higher the chance of you not being able to clear up enough room to install something new without sacrificing something you'd really prefer to keep. Unless you have the privilege of extremely fast internet access, I guess.

You're using NAS drives in a NAS, which isn't exactly the same thing as windows or games drives, where a user has to make regular decisions about deleting A to fit B, and then deleting B to fit C or go back to A

Hm? I said I can't read out the host writes data from my NAS, so I sadly can't check those (older, lower capacity drives). The ones I wrote about were my previous and current main system drives, the older one of which now lives in an external enclosure as a "thumbdrive".

I do agree it's only a potential situation, but as it's one i hear about regularly from those two gamers it does come to mind as a problem

One of them regularly downloads shows to his SSD, watches, deletes - and then rewatches a week or two later. He's managed to kill three WD greens this year alone, because he simply can't accept torrenting to it is sheer madness.

Well, torrenting to any low grade SSD is madness, so ... that is what it is. The write amplification on those small blocks of data must be insane. At this rate it sounds like he'd be better off just ... buying an external HDD? Or an internal one if he's got the room? Heck, if he's going through SSDs at that rate he could probably save money in the long run just buying a NAS, even with their high base cost. But that's another issue entirely This definitely sounds like a rather extreme edge case IMO.

 

[Jism]

A 500GB drive here has 64GB of overprovisioning. That is used to kind of extend the drive's life. The more you assign to it (just a Unallocated chunk of space) the longer your drive will last.

Partitioning does'nt help at all really; i think it's the controller that decides which bit is stored where. These are'nt traditional HDD's with potential bad sectors.

 

[Valantar]

A 500GB drive here has 64GB of overprovisioning. That is used to kind of extend the drive's life. The more you assign to it (just a Unallocated chunk of space) the longer your drive will last.

Partitioning does'nt help at all really; i think it's the controller that decides which bit is stored where. These are'nt traditional HDD's with potential bad sectors.

I think you've got the OP's question backwards: they were asking if partitioning would increase SSD wear, not if it could be used to work around bad sectors. But that's pretty much settled (as you say, the controller puts data wherever it wants, so partitions only exist on a file system level), as @Mussels said above the topic has changed to one of general SSD wear discussion.

 

[birdie]

1. There's no relationship between sectors your OS writes to and what SSDs writes to. This relationship exists for HDDs and classic (non-SSD) USB flash drives. There's always translation in order to facilitate wear levelling.
2. What actually matters is the amount of free ("discarded") space on your drive: the smaller it is, the faster it will die. If you have 99.99% of your drive full and you constantly overwrite the remaining 0.01% it will wear off it a lot faster than having at least 10% free.

In Windows `defrag /L Drive:` (this is not for deframenting, it's for telling the SSDs which sectors/blocks are actually free, i.e. "trimming" - this task should run in Windows by default weekly or monthly, I don't remember now) will take care of that. In Linux you should really use the ,discard mount option.

Overprovisioning is a moot topic. My 1TB HDD has 2MB exactly for that: SMART bad sectors reallocation. My 1TB SSD drive? I've no effing clue - no utility detects it or shows its size. Just to feel safe I don't fill up my SSD.

 

[Shrek]

Isn't that why there is overprovisioning?

Are you suggesting one defrags an SSD?