Gaming PC build verification

[Zach_01]

I boot win 10 in 21-24 seconds from an hdd, and my windows drive won't be on deaths door in 3 years. If you plan on throwing away your pc after 3 years go with an ssd. I see no good reason to put windows on one unless you plan on never writing to it ever, then it'll last a million years, but if you use it ie. surf the internet for an hour or more a day it won't last more than 3 years tops. It all depends on the user and whether or not they want to manually reinstall windows on a new ssd every 3 years.

A 1tb ssd with a 75tb write life is only good for 75 block writes before it starts to fail. The best ssd lasts around 3000 block writes but almost all consumer level ssd's are 3d nand which is only good for about 75 block writes before block death.

I've killed 2 ssd's now in the quest for a slightly faster windows experience, one died pretty much completely after about a year (ocz arc) so I bought another (different make) and that one started having major boot issues after about 2 years (one in 2 or one in 3 times it would take to boot after it started failing) so by all means run windows on an ssd if you don't like your computer, I know better.

Ssd as a game drive absolutely, but put windows on it and you're just asking for trouble.

Didn’t you read any of the content below? If what you are saying is true, all internet would be swarming with users complains and states of how bad SSDs are at lifespan.
Not true at all!
Although I never dealt with any SSD brand other than Samsung (PRO/EVO) who uses V-nand.

On my previous build I had a SATA 500GB SSD (MLC, 300TB total writes) as a boot/OS and a SATA 1TB SSD (MLC, 600TB total writes) as storage and additional installation space. After 3 years of daily usage, intalling/uninstalling on both and playing games, and with the two drives filled to 60~65%... the counter for total writes was 13TB on the boot drive and 2.2TB on the secondary. Keep in mind that pagefile was disabled from the OS drive and enabled (8GB) on the second 1TB.
So... SSDs die hard! Keep them cool as more as possible.

What short of brand, models, were those failed SSDs with that 75writes/cell only?

 

[oobymach]

Even samsung (600 TBW for 1 TB model) are only 600 block writes with their newest vnand, western digital blue ssd's are only rated for 150 block writes (600tbw on a 4tb drive). Once you write to a block more times than it is rated you start getting random corruption of that block, if you write to a whole sector of blocks with a pagefile for example that sector is basically unusable once it has exceeded its block write capacity. Many ssd's will continue to work fine with areas of the drive heavily corrupted, but once you start storing data on those sectors you will notice corruption. Games load with weird textures or bad models, movie files won't play (or have visible corruption/distortion), and you can't fix it. The new intel claim 164 PBW on their 1.5tb which is 109333 block writes if their claim is to be believed.

 

[robot zombie]

How many GB a day dyou suppose it takes to approach 600TBW in less than a few years?

 

[kapone32]

How many GB a day dyou suppose it takes to approach 600TBW in less than a few years?

Probably over 100GB for like 20 years

 

[oobymach]

That's the thing, it doesn't take 100gb a day to kill an ssd, you can kill areas just by browsing the internet. Your temp folder, your virtual memory, any area that's accessed regularly and repeatedly written and re-written with new stuff like webpage or game content will die first. You may not even notice but at some point your data may and probably will overlap these dead zones (which is what happened with my first 2 ssd's) and you get corruption.

 

[authorized]

@oobymach
Those drives didn't fail because of nand wear, you were either running them in unfavourable conditions (overheated) or it was simply bad luck. All kind of devices have a certain failure rate, everything can develop a fault.
Did you even check their total writes count before they died or are you just presuming they wore out?

Also, do you think mechanical drives last forever? They wear out with usage as well and will all eventually die.

I have had my Crucial MX100 512GB for about 4 years and my write count is a bit above 20TB. This drive has a TBW rating of "only" 72TBW and still, it appears I won't reach that limit in another 10 years.

An important point to make is that TBW is not an indicator of when the cells will give up, it's only a value guaranteed by manufacturer. There have been experiments in which constant writes were performed on multiple ssds of different brands and nand types used. They showed most of them exceeding their TBW by huge values, in many cases several times over.

Lastly, I have never heard of any home user having their ssd wear out.

Your claims are completely unfounded.

That's the thing, it doesn't take 100gb a day to kill an ssd, you can kill areas just by browsing the internet. Your temp folder, your virtual memory, any area that's accessed regularly and repeatedly written and re-written with new stuff like webpage or game content will die first. You may not even notice but at some point your data may and probably will overlap these dead zones (which is what happened with my first 2 ssd's) and you get corruption.

No, their firmware spreads out writes evenly across its cells.

 

[Zach_01]

Clearly he doesnt know much about SSD function, and how they manage and operate the data. Of course SSDs do not wear out a specific cell area. And thats why we dont use defragmentation tools any more. I wonder if @oobymach was using one regularly...



This is a drive that is working as a boot drive from day one more than 3 years ago (38 months, 36 on a PC, last 2 on LapTop). 16.7 TB... and thats about 15GB/day. According to SMART readings still 97% life remains.
A reminder: For 2.5 years was filled to 60~65%

 

[Splinterdog]

Use this table to quickly compare features.

That worksheet is a work of art. I'm gobsmacked how much information is there and the time and effort the creator has put into it.
It's quite remarkable and so easy to follow. Hats off.

 

[oobymach]

No I never defrag ssd, I don't think fragmentation is even an issue anymore. Haven't defragged a drive since windows xp. Also my first boot ssd (ocz arc) started doing the boot loop wherein windows doesn't load and you have to restart manually after only a year. I swapped it for a new ssd (both were 240gb) and used the old one as a game drive.

Games on the old ssd had issues like the background in diablo 3 would glitch when there was activity like magic, textures didn't load in Dying Light, one game wouldn't even boot, so I know there was corruption from exceeding the block write life in multiple areas of the drive which manifested in issues with the data stored.

When the games were re-loaded on one of my hdd's they worked fine. My usage could be considered heavy, I game and surf internet for many many hours a day, and also use a pagefile because games like gta5 don't like it when you turn it off. The ssd's both died from normal heavy use.

My tower is a thermaltake core v71 which has 18 total fans inside (which runs about 16db on quiet mode) including like 5 which blow air in from the front over my drive bay which runs 30-32 degrees, so it's definitely not a heat issue.

Also, I'm 38 years old and have been using computers since I was 6. I know more than your average user, and I killed 2 consumer level ssd's by exceeding their block write life in several areas of the drive in a period of 3 years. I'm not a noob.

 

[kapone32]

No I never defrag ssd, I don't think fragmentation is even an issue anymore. Haven't defragged a drive since windows xp. Also my first boot ssd (ocz arc) started doing the boot loop wherein windows doesn't load and you have to restart manually after only a year. I swapped it for a new ssd (both were 240gb) and used the old one as a game drive.

Games on the old ssd had issues like the background in diablo 3 would glitch when there was activity like magic, textures didn't load in Dying Light, one game wouldn't even boot, so I know there was corruption from exceeding the block write life in multiple areas of the drive which manifested in issues with the data stored.

When the games were re-loaded on one of my hdd's they worked fine. My usage could be considered heavy, I game and surf internet for many many hours a day, and also use a pagefile because games like gta5 don't like it when you turn it off. The ssd's both died from normal heavy use.

My tower is a thermaltake core v71 which has 18 total fans inside (which runs about 16db on quiet mode) including like 5 which blow air in from the front over my drive bay which runs 30-32 degrees, so it's definitely not a heat issue.

Also, I'm 38 years old and have been using computers since I was 6. I know more than your average user, and I killed 2 consumer level ssd's by exceeding their block write life in several areas of the drive in a period of 3 years. I'm not a noob.

OCZ drives, especially from that generation were known to be flaky. I have had a Corsair Mp60 and an OCZ vertex drive artifact and die on me. The thing is it was not the Nand but the controller that gave up the Ghost in both instances.

 

[authorized]

Games on the old ssd had issues like the background in diablo 3 would glitch when there was activity like magic, textures didn't load in Dying Light, one game wouldn't even boot, so I know there was corruption from exceeding the block write life in multiple areas of the drive which manifested in issues with the data stored.

Also, I'm 38 years old and have been using computers since I was 6. I know more than your average user, and I killed 2 consumer level ssd's by exceeding their block write life in several areas of the drive in a period of 3 years. I'm not a noob.

How do you know exceeding the block write was the cause of their failure?

OCZ drives, especially from that generation were known to be flaky. I have had a Corsair Mp60 and an OCZ vertex drive artifact and die on me. The thing is it was not the Nand but the controller that gave up the Ghost in both instances.

Yeah, afaik the controller is the most common cause of ssd failures.

 

[oobymach]

I assume it was block write failure since pagefile and surfing/downloads and temp updating daily for a year but I could be wrong, that gen of ssd's were only like 75 block write life (75tbw on 1tb drive) I know that after wiping it to use as a game drive (assuming it still had a lot of life in it) 3 out of 5 games had issues, plus the second drive (silicon power) had roughly the same treatment and started exhibiting signs of failure about 2 years in.

Didn't use it as a game drive though, just took it out and replaced it with an hdd after windows 7 stopped booting (one in 2 or one in 3 tries would boot to desktop and be mostly fine) so I decided no more system critical crap on ssd's for the next little while and built my newest compy since I had an excuse because windows 7 stopped booting.

I have a 1tb m2 ssd for games in my new rig, I'm not against ssd's, but I won't be using one for windows again for a while.

 

[Zach_01]

You can use AMD's StoreMI if you dont trust SSDs for boot/OS. Works great with SSD close like performance for OS boot time, apps/games launch and load time.

 

[(*^^*)]

I don't have any problems personally, so I feel like buying it as it is. But if you don't use m.2 SSD, you can use B450. The advantage of the current X570 is that Gen4 m.2 SSD and heat countermeasures and MB power supply efficiency are good and compatible with RyzenCPU. If Gen4 m.2 is not connected, neither heat protection nor m.2 will be required. The B450 costs a little time to update the BIOS, but is inexpensive. If you choose B450, you can spend money on cooling the Ryzen7 3700X or increasing the capacity of the SSD. By the way, ASRock X570 sells well in Japan.

 

[Vayra86]

That's the thing, it doesn't take 100gb a day to kill an ssd, you can kill areas just by browsing the internet. Your temp folder, your virtual memory, any area that's accessed regularly and repeatedly written and re-written with new stuff like webpage or game content will die first. You may not even notice but at some point your data may and probably will overlap these dead zones (which is what happened with my first 2 ssd's) and you get corruption.

Its clear you don't really know how regular SSDs these days work.

There are technologies under the hood such as wear levelling, TRIM, and overprovisioning is built-in as well. That is why many disks went from the good old 256GB to for example 250 or 240GB capacities. The NAND capacity hasn't changed, it just exposes a bit less to you.

I'm still rocking a Samsung 830... and it has been going like it was on day one. Zero speed loss, zero stability problems, good drive health, SMART values are all OK. If you bought into some of the bad controllers back in the day then yes, your situation may occur. But yours is an N=1 (2?) experience. Irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.

Endurance testing shows time and time again that even with the newer NAND (TLC, MLC, VNAND, no expections) the controllers have become so good there are no real problems. In most cases, the specced TBW is exceeded, and royally, at that. The jury is still out on QLC... but we already know that might be pushing things too far both for endurance and speed concerns for long-term / somewhat heavier consumer/prosumer usage. Even so, one QLC drive isn't the other.

I've had more mechanical HDD failures (2) in the past five years than I've had problems with an SSD. And one of those HDDs was a new one too... bought at the same time as the Samsung 830, and already got replaced because of too many bad sectors, and getting more noisy than it should. That alone counters your experience... but I won't be saying every mechanical HDD is worse than an SSD.


I read you had OCZ drives... those were notorious for being some of the worst ones in history. So yea... buyer's due diligence, next time, instead of blanket statements about technology you don't understand.