In news:h143jg$df$1@news.eternal-september.org,
~misfit~ typed on Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:11:16 +1200:
> Somewhere on teh intarwebs BillW50 wrote:
>> In
>>
news:118800f7-dc61-4538-9918-f64e8cfaf6e6@t11g2000vbc.googlegroups.com,
>> Roy typed on Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:09:47 -0700 (PDT):
>>> How about durability and risk of drive failure are there already
>>> known issues with these kind of storage facilties?
>>
>> Hard drives can fail in a couple of days (rare, but it happens) and
>> SSD can fail in a couple of days too (also rare, but can happen). The
>> important thing is SSD longevity is mostly govern by write cycles. A
>> SLC SSD lasts for 100,000 complete writes. Meaning if you overwrote
>> the whole SSD 24 times per day, it would take 11 years to burn it
>> out. Normal use though, it would take 227 years to get there.
>
> I am amazed at how much Windows (XP Pro in my case) actually reads and
> writes to disk. I put a new Seagate 160GB 5400.3 HDD in my R51
> ThinkPad at the end of last year and also have Hard Disk Sentinel
> (HDS) installed. HDS is an excellent disk monitoring utility that I
> highly recommend.

Hi Shaun! Odd, I am amazed how little my Windows XP systems actually
writes to the disk. As mine writes 100MB to 200MB a day. Using HDS shows
that Windows 2000 actually writes a tad bit more than XP does. Although
my XP versions are indeed tweaked to write less, while my Windows 2000
is not.

> I've just checked it's logs and, bearing in mind that my boot and
> programmes partitions are 10GB and 15GB respectively and that the
> rest is for data storage and doesn't get written to or read all that
> often I was surprised to find the following:

So you have three partitions? If so, how does that work out for you? I
find anything more than one partition per drive to be counterproductive.
As to use the free space effectively, you must resize the partitions all
of the time. Thus what's the point?

> Power on time: 183 days 18 hours.
>
> Average reads per day: 117.3GB
> Average writes per day: 70.42GB
>
> Total data read since installation: 25,271.25GB
> Total data written since installation: 15,210.19GB

Wow! That is like a thousand times more writing than I do on my systems.
I only get numbers like that when I am doing video or audio editing.

> Considering that, as I said, most of the drive is storage, that data
> log is essentially for a 25GB HDD!
>
> Ok, I do use my laptop for bittorrents but I have a daily data cap
> with my ISP of 1GB and I don't alwasy use it all by any means so I
> don't think that it impacts hugely on the above figures.
>
> Cheers,

I have no idea why you are writing so much on the OS and application
partitions. But say you had a 32GB SSD for the OS and applications. You
would use up two of those 100,000 lifetime writes per day. Double that
two to four for the worse case wear leveling. So that would mean if you
had a SSD, it would last for 25,000 days or for 70 years. Which still
beats most hard drives longevity. <grin>

--
Bill
Windows 2000 SP4
Asus EEE PC 701G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC