[Discuss] Reducing wear on SSD drives - worth the effort and, if so, how?

[Jerry Feldman]

I think we need to look at different uses. Certainly, the use of SSDs in
servers is quite different from consumers. Rich pointed out very
correctly that they need to be viewed as consumables. I think it is very
important for home systems to make backups where on a server you might want
to set up RAID or some auto replication system or file system.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2022 at 4:19 PM Shirley Márquez Dúlcey <mark at buttery.org>
wrote:

> When SSDs first became available, they were a poor fit for Unix-like file
> systems unless you made changes because maintaining atime (the time each
> file was accessed) caused very rapid wear of an SSD. Current distros
> mitigate that by automatically switching to a modified version of atime for
> file systems located on an SSD; it only guarantees to show whether the
> access time is more recent than the most recent change.
>
> The very rapid changes to log files can still be an issue in some use
> cases; again, write-behind caching lowers the impact of that, as the log
> might be updated multiple times before being written to disk. Systems with
> extreme workloads might benefit from using a battery-backed RAMdisk for the
> log files.
>
> On Thu, Dec 1, 2022 at 11:16 AM <markw at mohawksoft.com> wrote:
>
> > This is a space where "price" or "quality" make a difference.
> >
> > A "good" SSD has a lot of extra sectors to map in when it detects a write
> > error. All done internally to the drive. Better drives do a lot of things
> > to reduce wear. Some do dedup. Some don't store blocks that are all zero
> > or blocks that are all ones.
> >
> > Its kind of hard to adjust your usage, suffice to say, it is all based on
> > the amount of change. Individual SSD cells can handle from 3,000 to
> > 100,000 writes depending on the technology. It is possible to pay twice
> as
> > much for a drive that will have 30 times more usable write longevity.
> >
> > If your data is largely unchanging, it doesn't matter. If you have a
> > highly dynamic write environment, go for single level cell NAND flash,
> > that will last the longest. Find a good enterprise drive that has extra
> > capacity to remap as cells fail.
> >
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > The discussion about filesystems got me thinking about whether or not
> > > it's worth trying to reduce SSD wear on my first system (laptop) to
> have
> > > one. It occurred to me that file cloning seems like it could save a few
> > > writes...
> > >
> > > I've heard that some SSDs wear out pretty quickly, but I'm not sure if
> > > that's real or just rumor and innuendo.
> > >
> > > Anyone have thoughts on whether it's worth trying to reduce wear on the
> > > drive? If so, what kind of changes could I make to my system?
> > >
> > > I've installed Ubuntu, which I've been happy with as I'm not much of a
> > > sysadmin; I know it's resource heavy but I seem to be fine with 16gigs
> > > of ram.
> > >
> > > It's dual boot, but I haven't used windows except when I first got it
> to
> > > test; I'll wipe windows if I ever run low on space.
> > >
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Dan
> > >
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> > >
> >
> >
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-- 
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unix
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