In news:h15gbj$m1o$1@news.eternal-september.org,
~misfit~ typed on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:55:11 +1200:
> Somewhere on teh intarwebs BillW50 wrote:
>> In news:h143jg$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.

Hi Shaun! Well there are utilities out there that will tell you what is
doing all of that writing. AnVir Task Manager has both a free version
and a commercial version. The free one shows you in real time what
applications and services are using the drive while the commercial
version does this and keeps a running tally. I have both.

>>> 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.)

Okay that makes sense. Although do you really see an improvement with
all of that defragging? I wait a couple of years before I do it and I
haven't seen any performance increase since the old MFM hard drive days.
I always suspected the real bottleneck is the bus, not the seek time.

>>> 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.

Yeah that 70GB a day is a lot. I would be really curious what is doing
all of that writing. That AnVir Task Manager is one utility that would
tell you what it is.

>>> 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,

Fair enough Shaun. And that is just a few years away. ;-)

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