Question New 980 Pro - Crazy high amount of data written to it in just a few days ?

[jamieboo]

Hello Everyone!

I'm newly registered here... and desperately in need of help!

I've just built a lovely new system and on the whole things seems good! Hooray!
But I'm concerned about my SSD.
It's a lovely new 2TB 980 Pro - just installed a few days ago.
But when I installed Samsung Magician it showed a Data Written figure of 512GB!
A few hours later it was up to 790GB!
The drive had only been active for a couple of days!

What on earth is going on here? I'm tearing through the lifespan of my SSD at a million miles an hour!
When I shutdown last night it was 802GB and when I turned on this morning it was up to 805GB - not so crazy an increase, but still.
I thought maybe Magician is throwing up silly figures so I checked in CrystalDiskInfo - it gives the same figures.

All I have done on my new PC so far is install Windows, a few drivers and a few benchmarking apps.
Could it be that, simply because this drive is so fast, even a couple of minutes of benchmarking will use hundreds of GB?
I mean if it can write 5GB per second and I run a benchmark that lasts a minute, then that's 300GB right there. Right?

What else could cause this? Pagefile? Hibernation file? Search indexing?
I'm really stuck!

I'm running AppReadWriteCounter right now and top of the list at the moment is Microsoft Edge which has written about 1.5GB in the last hour. High, but I guess that's probably normal.

Any help here would be hugely appreciated! I don't want my new SSD to die in a week!

Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

The first few days/weeks of a drives life, especially the OS drive...it incurs a LOT of write cycles.

Monitor this once a week at most, not every day.
Keep a log, and you'll see the usage curve flatten out quite soon.

 

[jamieboo]

Thanks USAFRet!

I wondered that. I figured with new installations and updates there'd be lots of writes. But even considering that, doesn't 800GB in 3 days seem crazy to you?
What do you think about my idea that benchmarking a drive which can write at 5GB per second will automatically add several hundred GB to the data written total? Does that make sense?
But then surely every 980 Pro owner would notice this kind of behaviour.
What else could cause this kind of usage?

 

[USAFRet]

My 980 Pro has about 4.5TB in ~75 days.

Don't stress.
Keep a log, once a week, for a couple of months.
See what happens.

 

[jamieboo]

Ok, but 4.5TB in 75 days sounds more reasonable, I've torn through nearly 1TB in less than 3 days.
But yes, I'll keep an eye on things.
What do you think about the other things I mentioned... Should I be tweaking Pagefile? Turning hibernation off? Turning search indexing off?

 

[USAFRet]

Ok, but 4.5TB in 75 days sounds more reasonable, I've torn through nearly 1TB in less than 3 days.
But yes, I'll keep an eye on things.
What do you think about the other things I mentioned... Should I be tweaking Pagefile? Turning hibernation off? Turning search indexing off?

hibernation - OFF
Pagefile, probably leave it alone
Indexing - OFF

 

[jamieboo]

Ok, thanks!

Btw, I've had AppReadWriteCounter running for the last couple of hours to monitor what is busy writing. Thankfully there's been nothing really crazy so far today, but the top of the chart is Edge which has written nearly 2GB over the last 2.5 hours. I haven't been watching videos, I've mainly had forum tabs open. Is that about normal, or is there a way I can encourage Edge to write less?

 

[USAFRet]

Ok, thanks!

Btw, I've had AppReadWriteCounter running for the last couple of hours to monitor what is busy writing. Thankfully there's been nothing really crazy so far today, but the top of the chart is Edge which has written nearly 2GB over the last 2.5 hours. I haven't been watching videos, I've mainly had forum tabs open. Is that about normal, or is there a way I can encourage Edge to write less?

Whatever is on those tabs may have video running, even if you are not watching.

 

[jamieboo]

Whatever is on those tabs may have video running, even if you are not watching.

Ok, but that is normal usage, right? A few tabs open - pages which probably have small video elements here or there. I don't want the solution to be to inhibit normal usage.
Anyway, going by what AppReadWriteCounter is showing - 2GB written is I guess normal for having a few tabs open for a few hours, right?
I also imagine the sheer speed of the drive is contributing to this also. If it's capable of writing 5gb per second, then I'm sure the universe will contrive ways to use that capability!

 

[USAFRet]

Ok, but that is normal usage, right? A few tabs open - pages which probably have small video elements here or there. I don't want the solution to be to inhibit normal usage.
Anyway, going by what AppReadWriteCounter is showing - 2GB written is I guess normal for having a few tabs open for a few hours, right?
I also imagine the sheer speed of the drive is contributing to this also. If it's capable of writing 5gb per second, then I'm sure the universe will contrive ways to use that capability!

Right...that is normal use.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Should I be tweaking Pagefile? Turning hibernation off? Turning search indexing off?

If you have a mechanical hard drive also, then you can relocate pagefile to it.

 

[rcald2000]

jamieboo Hello. Question: How old is the Windows installation that you used? Meaning, how long ago did you run the installer to create the media on your USB drive? If it was several months ago, then it might possibly do a lot of writes to bring it's version current.

Hibernation: Turning off this feature through the Windows GUI will turn it off, but it won't reclaim the space. To also reclaim the space, you must "Run as administrator" the command prompt. Then run the command below in the black command prompt window and hit <ENTER>:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

If you run the command successfully, then it'll simply carriage return to the next line. You won't see any other confirmation; you'll only see an error if you mis-paste the command.

 

[jamieboo]

jamieboo Hello. Question: How old is the Windows installation that you used? Meaning, how long ago did you run the installer to create the media on your USB drive? If it was several months ago, then it might possibly do a lot of writes to bring it's version current.

Hibernation: Turning off this feature through the Windows GUI will turn it off, but it won't reclaim the space. To also reclaim the space, you must "Run as administrator" the command prompt. Then run the command below in the black command prompt window and hit <ENTER>:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

If you run the command successfully, then it'll simply carriage return to the next line. You won't see any other confirmation; you'll only see an error if you mis-paste the command.

Hi rcald2000

I downloaded my Windows media just a week or so before I installed it.
And hibernation... I just used that command earlier today - thank you! Hopefully that might reduce the issue a little.
But I really do wonder if the culprit was the benchmarking I did after installing Windows.
If I run a benchmark which shows my SSD is writing at 5GB per second, then it will be writing 5GB a second. And if the benchmark lasts a minute, surely that might explain the sudden writing of hundreds of GB?

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, all that benchmark stuff may have been the culprit.