Question Booting from SSD...The negatives.

[TheDarkSavant]

So, I've been using a nvme for boot drive for about a few mo ths now. During a search for UE4 specs, I came across an old post where a developer stated that using SSD as a boot drive isn't it. His reason was because the process of constant booting of a PC over the long haul would slowly weardown the SSD and reduce its overall performance. He recommend using a mechanical drive for the OS. I tired to find more info on this and couldn't find anyone else on the infoweb making such claims. Is anyone familiar with this statement? Considering no one mentions it, I'm wondering how accurate that info is. Please chime in!

Thanks in advance.

 

[rgd1101]

is that from years ago? not true anymore.

 

[Lutfij]

You may want to link the info you've read in order for us to make sense of what that person said. In essence anything you use over time, will wear down and degrade and eventually fail/die. For an SSD there's a MTBF number or an endurance number while there are app's/ utilities bundled with some SSD's to monitor lifespans of SSD's. In fact SSD's are faster than any HDD in RAID 0.

 

[Eximo]

Sounds stupid. Reading from an SSD causes very little wear and tear, and most of booting an OS is copying information into memory.

He may be referring to keeping a swap file on the SSD as a bad thing, and on early Windows 7/8/8.1 builds it was often recommended to disable the swap file. That is no longer the case, I believe. The system does a decent job of managing memory and only puts things on the SSD if it has to.

On top of that, well before the time the SSD is worn out, you will be able to buy one twice the size for half the cost.

About there myself already. $389 or something for a 1TB NVMe in early 2017 , now I can get a 2TB NVMe for about $230...

 

[RayOfDark]

It's BS. I used the same Samsung SM951 256GB NVMe PCIe SSD as a boot drive for 3 years and performance was almost identical in every benchmark I threw at it at the end as it was in the beginning.

 

[USAFRet]

If he was talking about a first gen SSD of maybe 32GB in size, from 2008 or so....then maybe he might have had a point. Maybe.

I've had an SSD as my boot drive since 2012.
All my systems in the house have been SSD only since 2014.

A link to this would be in order.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Outdated info.

 

[RayOfDark]

I think you're being overly generous, USAFRet.

My first SSD was a 40GB Intel X25-V purchased in 2010. People had managed to make me so paranoid about drop-off in performance that I benchmarked it for transfer rate and IOPs on a regular basis. After 5 years, performance was still the same as the day it was new.