Somewhere on teh intarwebs BillW50 wrote:
> 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.

That's interesting to know. Oh, I should have mentioned, I have swapfile
turned off too as I have 2GB of RAM I don't need it.

>> 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?


I find that it works really well. One partition for the OS and (what I class
as essential) stuff like AV and Lenovo system tools and one for programmes.
I've found from experience that 10GB and 15GB suit me just fine, with the
rest of the drive being for data.

As I have a home server with more than 3TB of storage I don't need every
little bit of space on my laptop's 160GB drive so a little 'waste' doesn't
worry me. I find that I can defrag the OS prtition (I use PerfectDisk) every
few days and it only takes seconds and defrag the programmes partition every
couple of weeks, likewise it doesn't take long. It keeps my system tidy and
responsive.

I don't defrag the data partition at all. Also, having smallish essential
partitions I'm able to keep a goodly number of Acronis disk images as
they're quite small so that, if I develop problems, I can restore back to
the latest that isn't bad. (Not that I've had a problem for ages.)

>> 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.

Odd. As I mentioned, I use bittorrent quite a lot but, as my data cap is 1GB
/ day I can't see that much of that is due to bittorrent.

>> 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>

LOL, it'd beat me too, unless I live to be 118!

I daresay I'll live long enough for SSDs to be mainstream and cheap.
However, the way prices are trending it'll be a good few years yet before I
swap from mechanical disks. I'm intending on using this R51 for a while yet
and, while a good SSD would probably benefit it (it's a bit 'bus bound'), I
can't afford a 'good' SSD of sufficient size. While I do have the server I
still like to carry the 160GB of data with me (actually, more would be
nice), without lugging external devices.

When good quality 250GB SSDs in 2.5" format are of a similar price to their
mechanical cousins I'll buy one. <g> Care to estimate when that'll be?

Cheers,
--
Shaun.

"Build a man a fire, and he`ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and
he`ll be warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchett, Jingo.