I need it so bad, i don't install games to my ssd because of lifespan purposes. My games are installed on raid 0 sata3 HDDs. Also i have 32gb Ram. They said, i have pro licence for storemi because of asus tuf gaming b450 and i'm waiting...

@KotS What lifespan? I use SSD from years now. Oldest one, that i use for now games and earlier was use as Windows drive, after 6 years of use it is still reporting as 98% lifespan remaining. Lifespan is not problem but capacity. 256GB was huge size for SSD 6 years ago, today not so much In normal home use or even semi professional use it is almost impassible to kill SSD

koniu:

@KotS In normal home use or even semi professional use it is almost impassible to kill SSD

My too, but i already reach Samsung 840 evo and Corsair Force 4 endpoint 🙂 On reliability HDD is still the best. While i agree with this article a personal cloud or NAS make internal software solution, nearly useless.

rl66:

My too, but i already reach Samsung 840 evo and Corsair Force 4 endpoint 🙂 On reliability HDD is still the best. While i agree with this article a personal cloud or NAS make internal software solution, nearly useless.

Mind if I ask, do you do a lot of database and heavy read/write loads on that particular PC @rl66 ?

Wonder how it compares to primocache.

rl66:

My too, but i already reach Samsung 840 evo and Corsair Force 4 endpoint 🙂 On reliability HDD is still the best. While i agree with this article a personal cloud or NAS make internal software solution, nearly useless.

Endpoint that they broke? Lost data or are they not working anymore? I believe windows can damage SSD more than a game, that is basically write once read forever, savegames often goes on the system disk. For me lifespan has never been an issue, i tend to upgrade my SSD more than i consume it.

KotS:

I need it so bad, i don't install games to my ssd because of lifespan purposes. My games are installed on raid 0 sata3 HDDs. Also i have 32gb Ram. They said, i have pro licence for storemi because of asus tuf gaming b450 and i'm waiting...

Wait,Whaaat? You dont write on SSD 60-100TB or penta in 5 years and do not bother with lifespan. Raid on SSD?wasted space and money.

KotS:

I need it so bad, i don't install games to my ssd because of lifespan purposes. My games are installed on raid 0 sata3 HDDs. Also i have 32gb Ram. They said, i have pro licence for storemi because of asus tuf gaming b450 and i'm waiting...

All modern SSD's (well, almost all), even from 5~7 years ago, include an over-provisioned area (just like hard drives do!) to use as spare pages when there is a small (usually correctable) failure detected within a NAND cell. Do not buy computer hardware and be afraid to use it. Use it, it will tell you how much 'life there is left', and if there's an issue, buy another one and clone the data over and use the old one as a backup (just keep in mind to refresh or leave it powered on for an hour or two, once every 3~6 months depending if the drive is TLC or MLC respectively, so it keeps it data 'charged'). Lifespan on drives... I got roughly 5 years of moderate use out of a Kingston 240/256gb SSDnow '300' series (synchronous NAND model) like the kind you'd buy at Staples circa 2012~2013. I got 5+ years of use out of a pair of Toshiba Q-pro 240gb SSDs wired up in Raid 0 on an intel Sata ICH host controller, dropping them to only 78% life left. These were used for daily gaming, I am physically disabled at the computer most all day when not *trying* to do something around here that needs doing. I then did a lot of content creation from about 18 months on, after I deployed those drives. They were mostly always 80% full or so, so they got used like crazy. These were MLC NAND drives. The Toshiba Q-pro drives would have lasted over 20 years as the current rate went, for video game CONTENT CREATION 8 HOURS A DAY. I have a number of MX500 TLC NAND drives in 500gb size, that I've had for a year or two now and they have barely lost a percent or two, but they're not system drives. I have a generic no-name MLC 500gb drive that's still got 98% of it's life left being used as a scratch drive for when I'm working with files and need hold-over space as I merge archives of source material for content creation - much like video editors use a scratch drive. QLC drives are okay for mass game storage and for browsing internet/email type office PC use. If this is all you can afford, no shame here - this beats loading your OS and large games from an HDD by a long shot. So yes, get an MLC drive or at-least avoid QLC if you intend to use the heck out of it, keep it full, etc. Otherwise, if you just game on your pc - which for the most part is write-once read-many operation, TLC will do just fine and will more than last the useful life of the hardware for the purpose (gaming). You'll almost always outgrow the drive before it gets 'worn out', and without moving parts like a hard drive, they actually wear less and are systemically more reliable. Though, nothing is perfect, so DO backup. On the subject of backup, Humble has a bundle with an ASHAMPOO BACKUP PRO 14 in it, fully licensed for 1$ USD, go get it if you see this over the next few days while it's still valid 🙂 EDIT: Yes unless you move lots of huge files around constantly, RAID will hurt your performance more than help. RAID gives better sequential performance which is rarely used outside of moving lots of large files, but you lose IOPS speed which is the speed at which lots of little files can be pushed/pulled from the drive - this is something lots of things use. There's a multitude of programs/software out there even from some manufacturers of drives themselves that will tell you '% life remaining' if you're so worried it's going to go belly up. You have a much stronger chance of losing the drive to a surge or just plain out-of-nowhere failure than you do of 'wearing it out' unless you have some type of worm virus constantly writing files... for a year. Also, some drives will, after 5 years from first power on, tell you they've reached 'the end'. (this needs verification!) Other drives, such as samsung or intel drives, may warn you that no more writing is possible, and that you need to backup your data immediately as they won't show up anymore after that. To be fair, you'd really have to abuse said drives to get to that point. --Cheers! ______<><______ Obligatory belly-up fish-for-a-drive... Added later: So last July when Ryzen 3xxx came out, I replaced the old computer. Grabbed me a 1tb generic house-brand 'Inland Professional' M.2 NVME drive for 102.99$ USD before tax. That's a pretty good price and a Samsung Evo was close to double that endurance - the Samsung non-QVO drives (which QVO is QLC NAND) will even last longer, The Samsung PRO line will last even longer yet! Started using the machine in mid-August after basically two to three weeks of staring at it while it ran tests etc before I switched my content creation over to it. So a little under a year, and I've got 1% use of the thing, it's 85% full, use it every day, content creation / file copying / backing up stuff / downloading half the internet sometimes it seems... ONE PERCENT USE! Do not be afraid to use your drives! Attached is crystal disk mark read-out of my 1TB NVME drive. Generic brand drive, almost worst-case for use scenario. It's not the fastest thing, not quite as "slow" as sata SSD, but it sure does the job just fine for what I paid. A typical gamer could expect to use the drive about as much, if not maybe a little more if they have super-duper quick internet. Maybe someone remembers the article, was it Anandtech? maybe that wrote drives to death to see how long it took to repeatedly fill them until they died? Attached Picture is safe for work (SFW).

The ssd you have windows installed wear a little faster due constant reads but still saving them and installing games on hdd is just dumb. It has lifespan of many years and if you ask me more reliable. I dont even use hard drives anymore.

I still have 2 ocz drives in use one a 240gb the other 256 vertex and agility series i got around when sandy Bridge and ivy Bridge were top dogs and they still work great. ssd's in my experience outlast hdd's but to be fair I've owned many more hdd's than I have hdd's.

Undying:

The ssd you have windows installed wear a little faster due constant reads but still saving them and installing games on hdd is just dumb. It has lifespan of many years and if you ask me more reliable. I dont even use hard drives anymore.

I think you mean the tiny constant writes from the OS. Reading off a SSD does not wear it at all. I still have a few hard drives for mass storage. Also cost is a factor since for the price of a 2TB 2.5" SSD, I can get an 8TB HDD...

Huggi:

I think you mean the tiny constant writes from the OS. Reading off a SSD does not wear it at all.

Incorrect, Reading wears nand too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Read_disturb

i have an 2.5 samsung evo 860 500GB that is working flawlessly , i have it since the first day it came out..... 😉

KotS:

I need it so bad, i don't install games to my ssd because of lifespan purposes. My games are installed on raid 0 sata3 HDDs. Also i have 32gb Ram. They said, i have pro licence for storemi because of asus tuf gaming b450 and i'm waiting...

Except for games that update frequently, games are actually one of the better things to put on an SSD if you're worried about lifespan, because they don't use write cycles all that often and most games today put their save files in your user folder. Games might write a lot of data, but as long as that data isn't replaced, the games actually protect your SSD from writes. Compare that to things like web browsers or your OS, where huge amounts of files are being written and overwritten on a regular basis. Bear in mind, the bigger the drive, the slower it will wear out (assuming your average write workload remains the same).

Cyberdyne:

Wonder how it compares to primocache.

Probably comparable, but they really aren't doing the same job. Tiered storage is basically just an algorithm that moves the least used data to the slowest storage tier, so you can have a smaller SSD in front of a large HDD and not worry about making sure the stuff you are using right now is on the SSD. If it has a RAM cache component, it's usually just there as a read buffer to facilitate the quick moving of data from the HDD to SSD, which is why the cache is usually capped at 2GB of RAM. PrimoCache is designed from the ground up to keep as much active data in RAM cache at all times, and the more RAM you assign to it the more gain you get from it. You should be able to use both, although my poor experience with StoreMi the one time I tried it left me turning it off before I could try it.

schmidtbag:

Bear in mind, the bigger the drive, the slower it will wear out (assuming your average write workload remains the same).

This. SSD wear and tear isn't a big deal anymore, once drives got to 500GB+ and TRIM became standard, the average lifespan of SSDs is in the 5 year+ range, which is about the same as average sh**ty desktop HDDs these days.

let me be another person who re-eassure you on regular sata SSDs ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CrystalDiskInfo 8.5.2 (C) 2008-2020 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- M.2 nvme wear out faster than regular SSD, also I don't trust them as much I had data corruption on my C: after too many BSOD (bad overclock) I recommend making clone backups of your system regularly if you boot on a M.2, if something happens it will destroy your data (40% of my files became unreadable, system was unrepairable, and the base structure of the file format was broke, had to be formatted or even restoring a clone that's supposed to replace everything wouldn't work) (1) Force MP600 Power On Hours : 2424 hours Power On Count : 407 count Host Reads : 19945 GB Host Writes : 21314 GB Health Status : Good (99 %) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 16'275 hours 24tb written (4) Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2TB Power On Hours : 16275 hours Power On Count : 3017 count Host Writes : 23969 GB Wear Level Count : 12 Health Status : Good (100 %) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20'436 hours 21tb written (2 years and 4 months of uptime) (5) Samsung SSD 850 PRO 1TB Power On Hours : 20436 hours Power On Count : 3691 count Host Writes : 21219 GB Wear Level Count : 25 Health Status : Good (100 %) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12'970 hours 52tb written (9) Samsung SSD 850 EVO 4TB Power On Hours : 12970 hours Power On Count : 2417 count Host Writes : 52612 GB Wear Level Count : 17 Health Status : Good (100 %) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6'624 hours 80Tb written (that's my download/swap/work drive, average of 12Gbytes/hour) (7) Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB Power On Hours : 6624 hours Power On Count : 1190 count Host Writes : 80626 GB Wear Level Count : 112 Health Status : Good (100 %)

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

While we're not sure that in the age of NAND based storage people still need solutions like StoreMI

Because games have gotten so damn huge !!! 500 GB SSD already fills up with less than 10 games, and obviously it's not a good idea to completely fill an SSD. 1TB is still quite expensive, and 2 TB is prohibitive ! RAM+SSD caching of data stored on HDD is quite a good compromise to allow many terabytes of stuff without paying through the nose.

Astyanax:

Incorrect, Reading wears nand too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Read_disturb

Huh, that's new for me. But I wonder how much of an effect that really has? In any case, NAND endurance is still pretty much a non-factor. Even QLC SSDs require a ton of writes outside of normal consumer usage patterns before the cells actually wear out. Premature failure would be the bigger concern IMO.

Astyanax:

Incorrect, Reading wears nand too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Read_disturb

Yeah that's not what that says. Do you guys actually read this stuff before you send it or? What YOU linked SPECIFICALLY SAYS it DOES NOT "wear the nand". What it does say is that repeat reads (hundreds of thousands) can cause the voltage to drop in the surrounding cells which could cause a failed read. It then specifically says that, of course, controller designers are aware of this and the controller will just refresh the information if it's read too much. It was like literally a paragraph to read, that was it.

rl66:

On reliability HDD is still the best.

Personally, we've had many more HDDs fail in the past decade than SSDs. We haven't had an SSD fail over here after our first SSDs, two old OCZ Vertex 2 drives failed. We've had a bunch of more or less expensive SSDs from Samsung, OCZ, Corsair, SanDisk, PNY etc. in multiple systems since then using them as we would a HDD and all of them are still working without issue (need to knock on wood, I guess). In the meantime, 8 HDDs failed (a happy mix of Seagate, WD and Samsung) since that time. So from our personal experience, SSDs have proven to be more reliable than HDDs over the past decade or so. That can just be a coincidence, of course. But I don't have any more concerns about SSD reliablity compared to HDD reliability these days, at least for personal use.