SSD and hostwrites

[christpunchersg]

Hi guys.

I'm a bit puzzled here... well actually, more like worried that I'm f*cking up my brand new SSD.

Over the weekend I got myself a 250gb Intel 510.

Installed W7 x64 on it, tweaked it so that prefetcher, index, defrag, and pagefile were all disabled. Did a few other general tweaks. Then I installed my 5 SATA hard drives.

On the very first day I ran a few benchmarks, then the Intel toolbox, did a full diagnostic (maybe this wasn't wise). Then I went on to install a few games and apps to play around with this baby.

Today, I checked my SSD's health again through "SSDLife Pro". Suprisingly, I've already acquired some 700GB+ worth of total writes on this SSD drive!

How in the world is this possible?

I have all my pagefiles on the hard drives off. I've redirected my SSD's temp files and IE/FF cache files onto a HDD.

Right now I'm checking the intel toolbox every 5 minutes, sitting here browsing youtube and a few other sites through firefox. Not downloading anything, there is no antivirus in the background or doing anything intensive. Yet my total host writes keep climbing up steadily for no apparent reason.

Am I doing something wrong? SSDLife pro says that in the last 7 days I've done 337GB worth of writes. This new OS hasn't even been installed for more than 3 days!

Can anyone please help? Any advice would be appreciated!

PS: Btw, should I have a filepage for each of my storage HDDs at all?

 

[kalston]

You should have the page file and temp folders on your SSD tbh. I really doubt that you'll manage to kill your drive before the warranty ends.

 

[christpunchersg]

You should have the page file and temp folders on your SSD tbh. I really doubt that you'll manage to kill your drive before the warranty ends.

Do I need a pagefile at all though?

And what about pagefiles on the non-OS traditional HDD drives? Do such drives even need a page file at all?

I know it's unlikely I'll kill this thing anytime soon, but right now it doesn't seem to make any sense why the writes are so high. Seems like Firefox is also taking up a lot of I/O write bytes for some reason, even when I've only got a tab or two opened.

 

[kalston]

You always need a pagefile IMO, it doesn't hurt to have one and it can make some apps or even the OS happy.
And one pagefile is enough, especially on a SSD. If disk space is a concern, set the minimum size to something reasonnable (I dunno, 512mb, 1gb or something) and leave the maximum size to whatever Windows recommends (just in case).

And no drive "needs" a page file, it's the OS who does (maybe you already knew that but it doesn't seem clear at all in your posts)

 

[Forceman]

Have you tried opening the Resource Monitor to watch drive usage and see what is writing to the drive? 300+ GB in 7 days does seem like a lot - but maybe SSDLife is reading something wrong. Have you tried checking it with the Intel SSD Toolbox? That should show total writes as well.

 

[Computurd]

yeah man i have yet to see a reliable life indication on any ssd. they are usually BS.

 

[christpunchersg]

Have you tried opening the Resource Monitor to watch drive usage and see what is writing to the drive? 300+ GB in 7 days does seem like a lot - but maybe SSDLife is reading something wrong. Have you tried checking it with the Intel SSD Toolbox? That should show total writes as well.

Intel Toolbox showed around 700GB in total host writes. SSDlife shows the same, however it states that the last 7 days I've written 360GBs to the drive. Could it be that these drives have GBs written over them when they come out of QA testing?

Anyhow, yes, I'm now at 750GBs total host writes in just a total of 4 days.

I used resource monitor to see what the heck is going on. Turns out that Firefox is responsible for a lot of C drive activities. So I went through a lot of trouble and now I have a ram drive setup where 99% of Firefox's writes are down on my RAM.

The other culprit is that Windows 7 does a sh*tload of logging. Every time you make a move, open an app, look at a drive, it logs it down somewhere. I've tried to redirect the default log directories to elsewhere, to a HDD, but it didn't work.

Also programs like steam for example writes a few dozen megabytes and up to 200mbs every time it starts, probably to update its various files and configs.

But at least I'm looking at no more than 20gb per day on average rather than 30-40gbs.

 

[Forceman]

Intel Toolbox showed around 700GB in total host writes. SSDlife shows the same, however it states that the last 7 days I've written 360GBs to the drive. Could it be that these drives have GBs written over them when they come out of QA testing?

Anyhow, yes, I'm now at 750GBs total host writes in just a total of 4 days.

I used resource monitor to see what the heck is going on. Turns out that Firefox is responsible for a lot of C drive activities. So I went through a lot of trouble and now I have a ram drive setup where 99% of Firefox's writes are down on my RAM.

The other culprit is that Windows 7 does a sh*tload of logging. Every time you make a move, open an app, look at a drive, it logs it down somewhere. I've tried to redirect the default log directories to elsewhere, to a HDD, but it didn't work.

Also programs like steam for example writes a few dozen megabytes and up to 200mbs every time it starts, probably to update its various files and configs.

But at least I'm looking at no more than 20gb per day on average rather than 30-40gbs.

Something still doesn't seem right. I've had my Intel for maybe 8 months now, and I only have 3 TB of writes on it, and I haven't done anything to reduce usage. I use it for my temp files, I have the pagefile on it, I have Steam on it, I use it pretty much just like a regular drive. So unless the usage is really front loaded, it seems like something strange is going on.