OT: Is Using SSD for Added Memory Ever A Good Idea
zombiewhacker
Posts: 684
In brief, my Dell Win 8.1 i5 8GB RAM desktop cannot be upgraded memory-wise, and I can't afford a new system right now.
Dell customer support and my computer tech guy both advise that my only alternative is to replace my existing 1TB HDD with a 1TB SSD. In theory, when my Dell swaps memory with the SSD, it will run much faster than it currently does when swapping with my old HDD. For the record, I render in Studio with 3Delight, so this is not a graphics card issue.. Total expense to me: around $200, including labor.
When I can earliest afford it, I will buy a new system build with all the RAM I need.
My question is, does what has been suggested to me sound like a good short-term solution for now ... meaning, say, from now until the end of the year?
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I just upgraded three old slow, RAM limited systems to SSD. It's like a shot of adrenaline. Wheee... zippy machines again. HOWEVER, I also do a lot of work that causes a lot of swapping and like you I started thinking about the wear and tear on the SSD circuits. They DO have a limited number of write cycles, although good quality SSDs reportedly have more write cycles than mediocre ones, and it has been suggested that for an average user (not a video professional) with an SSD that has plenty of wiggle room, (i.e. not overly full) with lots of spare cells to replace the ones that wear out, that an SSD could last the lifetime of the computer before having to be replaced.
Knowing this, I still thought that I do a LOT of swapping and unzipping and temporary storage that goes to various temp folders & files located on the SSD "C:" drive. So, I poked around in the settings and moved a couple of the more heavily used temp areas to the other storage drive (an HDD). I intend to try to get another 5 years of use out of my upgraded machines. But if your intention is to move on to a totally different machine "soon" then you might be OK.
My only real suggestion is that once you replace the HDD with an SSD, be sure to have a good backup plan and backup archives. Cheap SSDs might just "poof" your data without warning. New technology, I'm always afraid of new technology especially when it's holding my jewels.
Using an SSD for archived data that doesn't get changed often, but is needed to be read in vast quantities often, is ideal. It's the repeated writing of data (many many many TB) that eventually wears out the SSD cells. Don't skimp on the price. $200+ for 1TB is in the range. New technology, go with the guys who invented it, not the Johnny-come-lately mass marketers cutting significant corners to make it cheaper. Scan YouTube for trustworthy reviewers of SSD technology.
Oh, and "yes", moving the swap area and temp files from SSD to HDD does slow the system down again a bit, but if you have two drives in the system (your SSD and an HDD) then moving the swap area to the HDD permits overlap on your disk usage. The system can swap RAM to the HDD while it is simultaneously accessing program data on your SSD, so you get a little of the performance back again. I probably didn't need to move those areas but it was an experiment for me. I may actually move them back to the SSD later.
So, if you're only doing this temporarily, then don't sweat it. Don't fix something that ain't really broken.
I used a SSD for the windows swap file in my system. It lasted for years. In fact, it is still being used six years later.
I think the SSD will make the computer start up and reboot so fast, and run so quietly (no hard drive rattling) that it will feel like a new computer. I also think in this age of memory paging, unless you're maxing out this 8 gigs all the time then you might actually make a bigger difference with the SSD than the additional RAM.
while its true SSDs do have a limited read/write lifespan, they have come a long way since their first generation. My first SSD died within a year, so i was always worried about it after that. I have used a few since then, and a few months back i was thinking my current one is probably nearing the end of its lifespan.
So i downloaded Samsung Magician, which is a handy little program that will tell you how many read/write cycles your samsung SSD has done - and i believe Samsung post the general read/write lifespan for all their SSD models, so i compared where my current SSD was at with its indicated lifespan and was pleasantly suprised to find out that its not even close to its indicated read/write lifespan. From memory, it was only something like 10% of its lifespan, and its ~3 years old.
Obviously there is no garuantee that each drive will last as long as its indicated read/write lifespan, as there would be various factors that could effect that, but one would think that these figures that Samsung come up with would be on the conservative side to protect themselves.
I stopped worrying about my SSD life after i checked mine, i figure im more likely to want to upgrade to a bigger capacity before it actually dies anyway.
edit - ran Magician again and it tells me my SSD has written 41.6 terabytes, according to the samsung website their warrantied lifespan is 300TBW. Long way to go
One more point for clarification. price for decent quality typical SATA interface SSD 1-TB drive is currently about $100 to $150 in the US. My three were about $115 each. However, I quoted $200 in my previous post because I've recently been drooling over getting an NVMe interface SSD 1-TB drive that is three times faster than the SATA ones and the good ones currently cost about $200 and they are even newer technology. So I had $200 on my mind.
You have better options than a 1 for 1 swap unless the Dell you bought is utter garbage. Yould add the SSD, copy your OS and program files and leave data on the old HDD. That would let you buy a 512 Gb SSD instead of a HDD.
Either way this should be seen as the first part of a new system. It would easily transfer to a new rig very easily.
Yeah, there is no need to totally swap the drives. Just add the SSD and install your OS and favorite apps to it, and thus double your PC storage. You can still use the old HDD to archive stuff on. Videos and pictures make sense on HDD. Apps and things that need to load a lot are better for SSD.
I am assuming then that your Daz library is small enough to fit on a 1TB SSD since you only have 1TB as it is. So if you can get your whole Daz library on SSD you will become one very happy camper when it comes to loading and saving stuff in Daz.
I have an SSD as the system drive in my main render system with all the temp files, swap space, and CMS database on it. It shows 43,436 power-on hours (just under 5 years - I never shut down except for extended power outages and system cleaning). So far, I show 5.4 TB of writes (its a 512 GB drive) - it is rated for 180 TB of writes.
Go for it!
Conversely, a magnetic HD or even a hybrid SSHD will bring even a fast machine to a crawl.
First of February I'm buying a 2 TB M.21 NVMe SSD as the system drive. They are ranging from $200 - $250 and there are some even more expensive too. With the files sizes in DAZ and shear number of files in use it's exposing just how slow those old magnetic HDs really are. They're not suitable anymore except maybe, if you are pinched for money, as a image / incremental backup device for your SSDs. So hope you never need to restore off one because it will be so slow. Even as just a backup device, the 2 TB magnetic HD will be replaced with a 2 TB SATA III SSD drive as backup device on my desktop. I'd replace it with another 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSD except I elected to save $130 on the motherboard and buy one with only one M.2 NVMe slot instead of 2 (essentially that's the big difference between the MBs I shopped for).
You could also just buy a small cheap SSD and use it for swap only. That would also make swapping faster as there are not other processes using the SSD.
You'll notice the increase in performance of an OS SSD drive immediately. No nuance neccessary. It'll boot faster, programs will start faster etc. Rendering won't improve of course but that's not what it's for. You can have as little as 256Gb SSD for that. You don't need 1TB. An SSD makes little to no difference to Daz's performance (apart from how quickly the program fires up). First order performance issues there are elsewhere as your library grows, with disk performance being secondary. So you can keep your Daz library on the 1TB. It'll save you some cash.
If you have a fast open USB port and a fast USB thumbdrive you could use ReadyBoost to eek out a little bit more performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost
Uh, quick question since we are kind of on the subject. My SSD is over 5 years old and about 200 GB away from filling its full capacity of 2 TB. Should I be scrambling to replace it?
Check the S.M.A.R.T. data on the drive - I use CrystalDiskInfo - it will give you a warning if the drive is running out of relocation cells. If there's no warning you just need to add capacity with another drive.
You need more storage. Due to the way SSD's write data a 90% full drive will perform worse than a 50% full one and it will only get worse as you add more to it.
Whether it is wearing out is a matter of checking how many writes its performed, as mentioned CrystalDiskInfo should give you that.
Thanks for the info. Ill look into it for sure.
And here is a comparison of data loading time with different technologies of SSD and HDD:
Whatever you're using as a hard disk (mechanical/ssd) for you system should be used as a swap by windows. Disabling swap on windows is a bad idea.
As fast as SSDs are, they are not a replacement for RAM; the fastest SSD is still much slower that normal RAM. If SWAP is being used a lot, then you need more physical RAM in your system.
I would get a new one, although you could use the free space (or as much as is possible), then turn it into a backup. The old one is likely to keep going for a while - and even after it gets unreliable at writing data, the data already written will be accessible, and providing the components don't break, will remain accessible for years.
If you turn it into a backup, you can then only use it when you want to access anything backed up.
I use a 500GB SSD for C drive, and a 2TB SSD for data; I used mechanical for backups and for storing anything I use less often. I'm going to move to SSDs for backups next time I need another disk, as although their writes are limited, dropping one isn't a problem - at least no where near the extent of dropping their mechanical bretheran. I recently dropped/damaged two mechanical and that caused me issues.
You can't have too many backups or too much RAM - whilst they are open to argument, there is some truth in those statements. :)
Edit:
Just noticed this article.
https://hexus.net/tech/news/storage/138701-phison-demos-8tb-nvme-m2-16tb-sata-qlc-ssds/
Obviously you need very deep pockets.
If you bought a 2TB SSD 5 years ago you paid a lot of money for it and since you are 200 GB away from filling it up you will be glad to know to can now buy 4 TB SSDs for about $500 USD.
It might be worth your time to look into the RAM situation a bit more. Often times there is an "on paper" limit set for prebuilt systems that has nothing to do with the actual installed motherboard.
Search google for your model number and RAM upgrade. There is a good posibility that the real world limit is 16GB
That is one thing to consider about SSDs, filling them up with data is how you kill them prematurely. The way SSDs manage to last long is because they shift the data around. This allows the drive to wear evenly, think of it as like rotating your tires, except for your data, and its done a lot more frequently. But in order to do this, the SSD needs some free space. If the SSD is too full, it is unable to execute these important swaps, and the cells will die faster. Many SSDs have a special stash of storage that the user cannot access, this is done for this data swapping. But some large files may not fit this space.
This video does a great job of explaining it all. It also explains why not all SSDs are the same. Take special note of the larger capacity SSDs. These SSDs are larger because they are triple or even quad stacking the cells, which leads to a shorter lifespan. So the 1TB Samsungs EVOs will last longer than the 4TB ones for this reason.
...sad face...
Good Info, thanks all.
A lot of people STILL believe the old wives' tales about SSDs. This is the truth:
My SSDs are usually installed for 3-5 years and they get replaced with larger capacity units LONG BEFORE they fail due to write endurance issues. In fact, I've never had one fail.
Yeah, check the SMART data, but sheesh, don't be freaking out about an impending failure.
In all the conversations in this thread so far, not one of us smart techies has mentioned adding BACKUP drive space. I almost never buy "just one" drive, be it an SSD or an HDD. I buy a drive, and then I also buy a fat 10TB backup HDD to go with it.
If you're expanding your drive space, you SHOULD be expanding your backup capacity too. Nobody's going to convince me that everybody here backs up with iDrive or Carbonite. This forum should be reminding people about backups a lot more often. Seriously, I can't do it all folks!
I mean it, buy a backup HDD. There's really no good excuse for not being responsible. You'll thank me, and you'll have the right to tell me off when you have a failure and I scold/make fun of you for not having backups, but you actually do have backups.
"Get back at Murphy and get one over on Subtropic Pixel at the same time! Buy another HDD for backups now!"
Write endurance is a thing. On MLC and TLC it wasn't a major issue but these high capacity drives are QLC. QLC means quad level cell.on a NAND Flash chip, the actually medium of SSD's, the unit of storage is a cell. At first there was only 1 bit per cell, SLC, and capacity as terrible. So they've kept finding ways to increase the number of bits that can be stored in a cell. QLC, as the name implies, has 4 bits per cell. So higher capacity without adding more chips. However there's problem. Every time one of those bits need to change all 4 must be read and rewritten. Because idiviidual bits are never written but much larger blocks of data this results in lots of cells being moved around as part of wear leveling. So QLC is slower in writes and each cell is written to a lot more. QLC write duration is much lower, low enough that consumers may encounter the write lifetime on those SSD's.
I have found that when you have a lot of DAZ Studio content you've purchased to put it on the same disk as the OS and programs is a mistake because you want that very heavy I/O of all those DAZ files, Documents folder, Pictures folder, Music folder, Videos folder to not tie up the system disk with Windows and your programs & swap on it.
eg, I installed Windows 10, DAZ 4.12, and Blender on a system 2TB Seagate hybrid SSHD. Not fast but reasonable enough. Then I installed 4250 DAZ products after copying the DIM product installers to that same system disk and it took 2 3/4 days to finish and now the system disk had slowed way down as compared to before. (no worries though I am buying a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD in February as replacement drive for the hybrid SSHD)
So if you can afford it a separate SSD for system like Windows & programs and another SSD for all data files (Windows lets you move all that).
I thought all the new SSDs were triple or double stacking regardless of total storage. They call it 3D SSD.
Also, as far as the cells going bad you will not here a clicking sound like on magnectic disk as fair warning so you should have an equal sized SSD for imaged backups of each SSD you have actually using. At banks we typicall only did one weekly full backup with the other 6 days being increments. Now as we used tapes then we'd keep up to 2 months but it was very rare for anything outside the current week to ever be restored and it wasn't even that common to do that (over a 8 year period with 300 machines I administrered).
The alternative is to mirror the drives which the bank did too. You could mirror and backup if you are fastidious with a big budget.
Interesting. I thought that SSDs are not suitable for archiving, due to data retention,
but if you using it at bank, so the regular consumers has nothing to worry about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
SSDs based on NAND Flash will slowly leak charge over time if left for long periods without power.
This causes worn-out drives (that have exceeded their endurance rating)
to start losing data typically after one year (if stored at 30 °C) to two years (at 25 °C) in storage;
for new drives it takes longer.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention
Therefore, SSDs are not suitable for archival storage.
3D XPoint (Optane) is a possible exception to this rule, however it is a relatively new technology
with unknown data-retention characteristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint
No, I said we used tapes at the bank. Back when I did that kind of work tape were insisted upon for archival because of the smaller probability of failure than a magnetic drive. The tapes we used were very expensive (for a normal person) so don't think it was to save money that's for sure.
However, for a home user using an extra SSD to do system disk backups to and increments as well as another SSD to do the same for your data disk is reasonable. If you wanted always on availability against an SSD failing you'd mirror but now you are talking about having both a mirror and a backup and that's going to cost money. It's a thing now with SSDs to do mirroring (AMD even supplies RAID mirroring software for it's motherboards) instead of full+incrementtal backups but it's mostly a waste of money because most systems are made unavailable by a failed software upgrade and not an SSD failure which mirrored disks wouldn't protect against unless you remember to detach the mirrors before the software upgrade (part of SOP at the bank). Windows 10 doesn't work like that though and does automatic upgrades has a robust recovery and rollback mechanism anyway. Using mirrors makes you remember to detach the mirrors before every software upgrade and then test at which point you decide to go to the detached mirror or go to the upgraded mirror. However, Windows 10 already has excellent rollback capabilities without special hardware configurations using extra hardware. Mirrors are for big businesses with high availability with frequent system level software changes.
Personally, I will set up my sysems for weekly full + incrementals and save the money on adding mirroring too (that costs good money too which I'm short of so currently I have just manually copied most of my data files and licenses to an external Seagate USB HD).
What modern banks do (it's been 10 years since I worked at one) I don't know but they probably mostly still use tapes I'd guess although I know some that were using harddrives for some specific use cases, that wasn't common though.