"Host Writes" on a SSD?

[Bop]

What exactly is Host Writes in the SSD SMART info?

I got my SSD up and running in my PC a few weeks ago. Due to a driver problem I tried to diagnose I essentially went back and forth between Vista and Win7 four times before I figured out the problem and just settled my video drivers will not work in Win7 yet.

My Host Writes is 495GB already... is that how much I've written to the SSD? I don't even know how I could have accumulated that much unless HDD Erase 3.3 counts as a lot of writing. Windows only takes up less than 20GB and at max I put 30GB of apps maybe during two of those installations. (160-190GB) That gets me worried about the longevity of my drive because I would eventually like to go back to Win7 and be able to reformat once or twice a year. (if I get major HW upgrades)

 

[Daemas]

SSDs are good for something like 100GB a day for 5 years. Which is like 182.5TB. You're fine.

 

[Bop]

SSDs are good for something like 100GB a day for 5 years. Which is like 182.5TB. You're fine.

Well, I am already seeing a performance decrease. I also still do not know exactly what "Host Writes" is either; if it is what I think it is then I don't know how it got up to 500GB in one week.

 

[InvisiBill]

I've heard a number of people say that their G2s came with some writes on them brand new. I assume this is from Intel's testing or something. *shrug* Mine's currently at 257GB and I actually copied my partitions over rather than doing a clean install. Keep an eye on the number and see what sort of rate it increases at. It might only go up 1GB per day during normal use. FYI, the SMART data is per drive, even though you select a partition to show it (not that it matters for most people).

Without TRIM, you'll see degradation as soon as all the blocks have been written to once. Once that happens, every write will first require the flash chips to be erased, adding time to the write operation.

 

[Bop]

I've heard a number of people say that their G2s came with some writes on them brand new. I assume this is from Intel's testing or something. *shrug* Mine's currently at 257GB and I actually copied my partitions over rather than doing a clean install. Keep an eye on the number and see what sort of rate it increases at. It might only go up 1GB per day during normal use. FYI, the SMART data is per drive, even though you select a partition to show it (not that it matters for most people).

Without TRIM, you'll see degradation as soon as all the blocks have been written to once. Once that happens, every write will first require the flash chips to be erased, adding time to the write operation.

It's gone up 5GB in one day despite the fact all I did was install 130MB drivers. All downloads go to my platter drive. I'm not sure how or why it is doing this. If it keeps going up at this rate I may as well send it back for a new one. It should not be doing this.

EDIT: Just rebooting adds 100MB to the host writes. Also found this quote, "20GB of write-erase per day for five years should consume only about 550 cycles on an 80GB X25-M." (TR) I'll probably only own the drive for 1-3 years so I guess it's ok like Daemas says even if something doesn't seem quite right. Maybe it is Vista? For some reason installing W7 + nvidia drivers under the SSD causes BSODs while it works fine on my platter drive.

 

[Cyant]

When you write 4k of data on your SSD it can "write" up to 512k twice.

Current SSD have pages sized at 4k each and have 128 pages per blocks (so 512k per blocks).
Blocks is the smallest group of data a SSD can delete.

So let's saywe have the worst worst case scenario. You have a 4k file to store.
Now let's say you have a 512k page which was full but you deleted a 4k file on it.
before you can write the new 4k data at the spot the old one was the SSD has to:
-Read the remaining 508k of data.
-Do a delete operation of the page (write 512k of 0's)
-Write the copied 508k of data + the new 4k

The SSD has now writen 1MB of data to store your 4k text file. Congratulation. Now I know this is the extreme scenario but in theory it could go up to that. That is why when you install 130MB of drivers that the count can go way up. This will happen a lot more with small files for obvious reasons. No need to return your SSD that behaviour is normal that is now SSD work.