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Re: SSDs and Sudden Power Failures

Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2013 9:20 am
by The Egg
Hibernation sucks. It's nearly as slow as a cold boot, and has stupid quirks. I can't see any benefit, and always disable it.

As far as Thief, I've never heard of a game acting up because it's on an SSD. From the game's perspective, I'm not sure how it would know the difference. Of course, I run my games off a mechanical drive (mostly because my Steam install is over 400GB), so I don't really have any experience running old games off an SSD. Being that Thief is almost 10 years old, my first guess would be the problem is driver-related. I'm sure you updated them when you reinstalled Windows.

Re: SSDs and Sudden Power Failures

Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2013 11:43 am
by Flying Fox
ronch wrote:
I also configured the page file so that the OS will use my mech hard drive instead of the SSD to reduce wear and tear on it, like so:
IMO that is kind of dumb. You do want the SSD speed to help you if the OS does need to page out to disk. What is this obsession about trying to write as little as possible to the SSD? You bought the drive to use not be a garage queen. :roll: I actually did not move my entire user profile off from the SSD for the exact same reason: temp and cache files. Those are the ones you do want fast random access.

But of course, go get enough RAM first.

ronch wrote:
By the way, is there a disadvantage by disabling hibernation (apart from obviously not being able to hibernate)? Can it possibly harm the SSD?
Hibernation is arguably less of an issue, especially if your machine is always on (no sleep/hybrid-sleep) or you shutdown the machine every night yourself. Hibernation is basically a dump of the RAM contents to disk, whether it is triggered by the OS or you. Laptops by default have been configured to hibernate after sleeping for some time (to avoid discharging the battery) so that make sense. With UPS and monitoring, you may want to configure the system to hibernate if power is out for too long. That way you can save the state of the system. Only on hibernate does the file gets written to. So unless you hibernate a few times a day, the amount of writes is not too big of an issue. Did you even read the TR and Anandtech articles? For nominal usages you are looking at 5-10 years before the amount of bytes written would be an issue. You do have to understand the trade off here with speed vs lifetime. Heck, with the quality of mechanical drives these days, you are lucky that it lasts more than 5 years.

The Egg wrote:
Hibernation sucks. It's nearly as slow as a cold boot, and has stupid quirks. I can't see any benefit, and always disable it.
With an SSD, one would argue the cold boot may be faster sometimes that's why it is less of an issue. I turn it off on my desktop as well. I do have an UPS but I use the desktop so often that I have time to shutdown the system before any extended power outages. On my laptop though, I leave it enabled and I do hibernate it with a dozen of browser tabs and other apps open. It's a lazy way to quickly "leave the office" while preserving state.

Re: SSDs and Sudden Power Failures

Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2013 12:53 pm
by just brew it!
TRIM does not affect the amount of free space seen by the OS, it only affects the drive's internal bookkeeping that tracks which flash blocks can be re-used without relocating existing contents to a fresh block. So TRIM (or lack thereof) isn't responsible for the "missing" space.

My guess is that you've either got a restore point taking up extra space, or your swap file got automatically expanded at some point, or you installed Windows updates, or some other Windows-related thing -- there are a lot of ways Windows can chew up extra disk space. It's just more noticeable when you're using an SSD since you've got less space to begin with.

Re: SSDs and Sudden Power Failures

Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2013 1:18 pm
by Melvar
ronch wrote:
Used Samsung Magician's Performance Optimization feature, which says that if my OS doesn't support TRIM, I can use this feature to optimize my SSD's performance.


Windows 7 does support trim, so this shouldn't be necessary. This link shows how to check that it's enabled: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 0e05dac350


ronch wrote:
Edit - Uninstalled Samsung Magician. Thief is working fine now. So it's the Magician's fault.


You can just remove Magician from the startup folder if you want it installed but you don't want it running all the time. You'll have to do it again each time the program updates (it will only update when you run it manually and tell it to update when it asks).


FYI, I have my temp folder & swap files on my 120 gig SSD and I'm still just under 1TB total writes after about 9 months of use.