Question Optiplex 9020 excessive writing to brand new ssd....

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Jake Maverick

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So, been having nightmare IT issues lately...but long and short of it I just had to replace EVERYTHING.

Got 2 second hand Optiplex 9020s. SSDs were starting to fail, so i got two brand new Kingston 500gb ssds for them. Only been in for a few days and both are starting to fail...already down to 99% health in HD Sentinel already.

Both optiplex's are dual booted with linux, one has windows 7 and the other windows 10....this machine is windows 10 and over 4 days 18 hours usage it's saying 651gb data written! It's basic internet machine...apart from the install it really shouldn't have written very much. It's written over 20gb in last 3 1/2 hours with the system mostly at idle....I think it's the excessive writing to ssd that is causing the damage. So I'm asking.....anybody understand what is going on here and whether it can be fixed or not?

Thanks!
 

Jake Maverick

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nah not at all! just a few emails and surfing about, not a lot of videos, few short clips on twitter maybe.....but i do have a lot of tabs open, it's looking like Chrome could be the main culprit, no twitter there but facebook though?
 

USAFRet

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nah not at all! just a few emails and surfing about, not a lot of videos, few short clips on twitter maybe.....but i do have a lot of tabs open, it's looking like Chrome could be the main culprit, no twitter there but facebook though?
FB can be a main culprit.
LOTS of vids streaming along, even if YOU are not watching them.

But, don't stress.
Monitor this once a week at most.
Keep a log, see if a trend emerges.
 
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Jake Maverick

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um, fb tabs don't even load until i click on them though...and only about half a dozen of them. Starting to think it is windows 10, the linux machine doesn't do it and have similar there.....

it's a bx500 240gb...thanks for the link! doesn't specifically say for that drive but looking like 5 years of life on those specs...funny they quote 54gb a day! I think it is windows 10 doing it tbh, will dual boot and switch mostly to linux when i get the chance to do....
 

USAFRet

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um, fb tabs don't even load until i click on them though...and only about half a dozen of them. Starting to think it is windows 10, the linux machine doesn't do it and have similar there.....

it's a bx500 240gb...thanks for the link! doesn't specifically say for that drive but looking like 5 years of life on those specs...funny they quote 54gb a day! I think it is windows 10 doing it tbh, will dual boot and switch mostly to linux when i get the chance to do....
For the BX500
https://content.crucial.com/content...x500/flyer/crucial-bx500-ssd-productflyer.pdf

240GB = 80TBW, or 43GB per day, every day, for 5 years.

As said, monitor this once a week at most.

The "5 years" is simply the warranty.
Likely it will last far longer.
 
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USAFRet

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I always have the monitoring s/w open, HD Sentinel. Crystal Disk info is also picking up same damage now. Strangely the other machine running linux has been on for a lot longer but still at 100%.
The difference between 99% and 100% can be simply a rounding error.

Also, that life percentage is often just a read comparison of how much the drive has written against what the warranty TBW is.

If 700GB = 1%
Then 100% = 70TBW

It is quite common to write a lot of data in the first couple of days/weeks of a drives life.
Leave it alone. Check it next week. Then a week after that, and so on.

Keep a log, make a graph.
 
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Jake Maverick

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A few days back it dropped to 98%, now it's dropped down to 97% @ 18 days 1 hour use. Same drive in identical linux system not deteriorated at all. Am starting to worry here...most of my important data is on this machine. Just no funds to get another system. HP Compaq systems seem to be much more reliable.
 
Sounds like windows is going crazy with the swap file.
How full is the drive?
A small 240 gig drive with windows and programs on it leaves very little space on the drive for wear leveling. So all of the writes are happening to the same cells over and over.
You can not compare it to the Linux machine. Different operating system with vastly different memory usage.
My lubuntu machine uses almost half a gig of ram for the operating system.
Depending on windows machine it takes 2.5-3.5 gig of ram plus another few gigs for virtual memory on my SSD drives.
Which leaves much more ran available for programs to use, and less Virtual memory usage(SSD).
 

Jake Maverick

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this could be the issue! i have since split it to dual boot with linux, but not managed to fully switch over to linux yet. do you know of any good progs for xubuntu that will monitor ssd health? i couldn't find any which is main reason i'm on windows 10 here just so i can keep an eye on health of drive. But currently Windows has 80gb partition of which roughly 10gb is free...i thought that would have been adequate?
 

Pextaxmx

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there was a recent post that the exactly same Kingston SSD with abnormally high TBW (high 6 figure GB in 4 years).
I think the drive has different data written formula in SMART report. Chances are, those TBW numbers are just mis-calculated numbers by the SMART reader.
If Kingston offers their own SMART reporting software, try that as well to see if you get the same numbers

edit: I didn't realize the thread extended to the second page. If your Crucial drive is doing the same, please ignore my comments
 
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Jake Maverick

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i got a 1 tb ssd in my main rig, only just starting using windows 10 there as well...no issues on health but it does not get nearly as much use....but thinking on it, it was showing degradation before i dual booted it, but 10gb should be plenty though i would have thought? I'm thinking these optiplex's maybe over powering the drive...on the other machine i had a problem with a brand new usb drive failing pretty quickly so an over powered port would do that a swell? so regret buying these optiplex's now wither way :-(
 
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