[SOLVED] ExFAT vs NTFS for PC SSD?

[pnartg]

I've read that NTFS is hard on flash drives because it involves more writes yet most of the online sources I've seen still suggest NTFS for PC's main storage and only suggest ExFAT for external Flash devices. All three of my recent Windows 10 PCs and laptops use SSD storage but they all came formatted with NTFS. I use them for photo and video-file editing with tools like Photoshop and Premiere Pro and they receive heavy (typically 7-days a week) use shared by multiple users. I do both studio and wildlife photography with typical individual shoots numbering in the thousands of files. Would ExFAT be a better choice WRT to longevity of the storage devices?

Thanks in advance.

 

[USAFRet]

Leave it as NTFS.

SSDs dying from too many writes is a long dead concept. Not since the small, very first consumer level drives.

All of my house systems are SSD only. All NTFS. And I do use these systems for a lot of things...CAD, photo, video ed, etc, etc.

 

[pnartg]

SSDs dying from too many writes is a long dead concept. Not since the small, very first consumer level drives.

Can you cite any data showing this issue has gone away? Back in the 2009 - 2016 period there were several large studies that questioned the AFR's of SSD's, especially as feature geometry was shrinking. One of them was by one of the developers of SMART - Gordon Hughes, and is cited in this Tom's Hardware article: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html.

But since that time I can find very little good quality research on SSD AFR. The one study I could find that's broadly-cited - BackBlaze - has been widely criticized for comparing SSDs and HD's of radically different ages. So can you please point us to some recent good quality data showing what current SSD AFR's are, especially since Western Digital/Seagate are promoting RAID-able HD's with <0.5% AFR's.

 

[USAFRet]

That article is a decade old.


But a salient paragraph, right on the first page...
----------------------------
You shouldn’t have to worry about the number of P/E cycles that your SSD can sustain. The previous generation of consumer-oriented SSDs used 3x nm MLC NAND generally rated for 5000 cycles. In other words, you could write to and then erase data 5000 times before the NAND cells started losing their ability to retain data. On an 80 GB drive, that translated into writing 114 TB before conceivably starting to experience the effects of write exhaustion. Considering that the average desktop user writes, at most, 10 GB a day, it would take about 31 years to completely wear the drive out. With 25 nm NAND, this figure drops down to 18 years. Of course, we're oversimplifying a complex calculation. Issues like write amplification, compression, and garbage collection can affect those estimates. But overall, there is no reason you should have to monitor write endurance like some sort of doomsday clock on your desktop.
----------------------------

An 80GB drive, and 'decades' before potential fail.

Actual endurance tests:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/...w-120gb-250gb-500gb-750gb-1tb-models-tested/3

The SSD Endurance Experiment: Data retention after 600TB

Six weeks have passed since our last SSD endurance update. When we last visited our heroes, they had just crossed the half-petabyte threshold—no small feat for a collection of consumer-grade...

techreport.com

Further, what is the current TBW amount on your personal drives?
On one of my recently decommissioned systems...7 SSD's, with a cumulative 95TBW.
The C drive (500GB Samsung 850 EVO) was about 70TBW. Over 5 years, at 24/7 use.
The warranty number on that drive is 150TBW. It has already aged off the warranty, and nowhere near the TBW number.

Assuming it does not die of something else, I expect that drive will last in 24/7 use until 2030 or so.


Drives have gotten larger, and the wear leveling algorithms have gotten way better.

Do you know of any drives, in normal consumer use, that have died from too many write cycles?
I've asked that question in here many times, and, to date, no one has said 'yes'.

 

[LinuxDevice]

I can't answer, but I think @USAFRet is right. I say this because the circuitry and programming for wear leveling is why the life of solid state drives has increased. It is still true that if you were to use a drive synchronously, rather than with buffering enabled, the drive would still die, but the leveling part of the drive won't care if this is NTFS or exFAT doing the writing when buffering is enabled. Of course you'll not know for sure unless you use a drive of each filesystem type and test until they are destroyed using the same amount of writing.

 

[pnartg]

Further, what is the current TBW amount on your personal drives?

Good question. How do I tell? The drive in my Lenovo Thinkstation is a 1TB WD SA 530 and the current WD Dashboard utility says "Life Remaining" - "Not Supported". When I run the SMART utility it doesn't produce a TBW number in the report. It says Host GB Written is 9186 and NAND GB Written is 1846. The PC has been running 24/7 since about November of last year so power-on hours is 10184.

 

[USAFRet]

Good question. How do I tell? The drive in my Lenovo Thinkstation is a 1TB WD SA 530 and the current WD Dashboard utility says "Life Remaining" - "Not Supported". When I run the SMART utility it doesn't produce a TBW number in the report. It says Host GB Written is 9186 and NAND GB Written is 1846. The PC has been running 24/7 since about November of last year so power-on hours is 10184.

CrystalDiskInfo can produce that number.

 

[USAFRet]

It says Host GB Written is 9186 and NAND GB Written is 1846. The PC has been running 24/7 since about November of last year so power-on hours is 10184.

The estimated lifespan of that 1TB drive is 400TBW.
https://documents.westerndigital.co.../pc-sa530-sata-ssd/product-brief-pc-sa530.pdf


If we assume that Host GB is ~10TBW, in 1 year, that extrapolates out to the year 2060 before it reaches that 400TBW number at a constant use rate.

 

[pnartg]

Thanks! Any idea what the "life remaining - not supported" message on the WD dashboard means?