[SOLVED] Should I be concerned with this a amount of Total Host Writes?

[James_369]

I bought this computer five months ago and I just noticed today that the lifespan for my boot drive went down by another percent today. This has me looking around to see what the problem was.

Should I be at all concerned with the host writes? I was told that SSDs are super tough and can last an incredibly long time and losing 2 percent is possibly not a huge deal.

 

[USAFRet]

4.6TB is not out of the norm.
4.6TB in only 633 hours....hmm.

What do you use this system for?

 

[Bob.B]

I bought this computer five months ago and I just noticed today that the lifespan for my boot drive went down by another percent today. This has me looking around to see what the problem was.

Should I be at all concerned with the host writes? I was told that SSDs are super tough and can last an incredibly long time and losing 2 percent is possibly not a huge deal.

Might be normal depends on what stuff your running.
It works out to 7+GB per hr.
On this machine I see a little less than 2GB per hr.
Perhaps use task manager and the resource monitor to try and figure out what's doing all the writing.

 

[James_369]

Might be normal depends on what stuff your running.

I only have the system installed and a few programs such as Audacity (though the raw data is on HDD), GIMP, Microsoft Office, Firefox, Discord, Steam (not the games though, they go to the HDD), and Hearthstone come to mind when it comes to frequently used things I run on SSD.

Looking via Process Explorer, Firefox seems to be a pretty big culprit, as well as Discord.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Looking via Process Explorer, Firefox seems to be a pretty big culprit

Move Firefox cache folders to a mechanical drive.

Create 2 partitions on a mechanical drive (1GB each).
Mount them to folders:

c:\users\<yourusername>\AppData\Local\Firefox\profiles​

c:\users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Firefox\profiles​

For mounting to be possible, folders have to be empty. Close Firefox and move data from those folders to appropriate partitions first.

 

[James_369]

What do you use this system for?

It's used as my system disk. Other than that, normal browsing like Firefox, Discord, and usually using Audacity, GIMP, and Microsoft Office to create things. Most of my games are on the HDD with the exception of Hearthstone, so any gaming I do I don't think effects the SSD.

EDIT: I should also bring up that I have done a few deletions to preserve SSD space, such as frequently clearing out temporary data and clearing the System Restores after every update from Windows. I'll definitely stop doing these now.

 

[Bob.B]

I only have the system installed and a few programs such as Audacity (though the raw data is on HDD), GIMP, Microsoft Office, Firefox, Discord, Steam (not the games though, they go to the HDD), and Hearthstone come to mind when it comes to frequently used things I run on SSD.

Looking via Process Explorer, Firefox seems to be a pretty big culprit, as well as Discord.

Some reading.

FireFox is writing like 2.43 TB of data to SSD in 24 hours, How to change it?

Firefox written 2.43 TB to the SSD, its degrading soo fast, is there anyway to change the location of the C:\Users\Xa\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\gn523c9n.default-release\sessionstore-backups\recovery.jsonlz4 file saved. It is the Recovery.Json file which is writing that much data! I...

linustechtips.com

I use FF with those options have not seen anything bad happen.
Test it out see if your writes per hr go down.

 

[James_369]

I use FF with those options have not seen anything bad happen.
Test it out see if your writes per hr go down.

I had just done that yesterday as part of my digging around, so hopefully the writes go down.

I should note, though, that in between posting this topic and this very post, it went up from 4636 to 4649 GB.

 

[Bob.B]

I had just done that yesterday as part of my digging around, so hopefully the writes go down.

I should note, though, that in between posting this topic and this very post, it went up from 4636 to 4649 GB.

FF may not be the only culprit.
There may be multiple things involved.
It will take some time to dig out the pieces that are doing the writing.

 

[James_369]

FF may not be the only culprit.
There may be multiple things involved.
It will take some time to dig out the pieces that are doing the writing.

Did a little digging, noticed Explorer.exe had about 643 MB, but isn't writing any more data so it's there.

Other than that, Discord's the other one, but at most it has about 350 MB written today.

 

[sonofjesse]

Small drives do have less TBW ratings. I know the Samsung pros went like 100x of the TBW in benchmarks. I wouldn't worry right now.

When you upgrade get a 1TB or 2TB drive they have more "life"

 

[ClapTrapper]

How much physical RAM do you have? If you don't have enough Windows is going to constantly be hitting the swap disk.

Plus,see my reply to sonofjesse above-that amount of writes is way out of whack. Something is hitting SSD hard.

If you ruled out Windows swap disk,I hate to say this,because it usually isn't,but scan for trojans. With Chai coin using drive space you can expect to see many viruses mad to mine Chia. BUT IT PROBABLY IS NOT!

 

[ClapTrapper]

Small drives do have less TBW ratings. I know the Samsung pros went like 100x of the TBW in benchmarks. I wouldn't worry right now.

When you upgrade get a 1TB or 2TB drive they have more "life"

Nah,not like this!
I am using a WD 256 as my boot drive and I have this:
Total Host Reads=2851 GB
Total Host Writes=2930 GB
Power On Count=468 count
Power On Hours=1113 hours

 

[ClapTrapper]

Also,how full is the SSD? You should keep a absolute bare minimum of 10% free on newer SSDs. More for older SSDs.

 

[James_369]

How much physical RAM do you have? If you don't have enough Windows is going to constantly be hitting the swap disk.

8 GB. Paging file is a bit of an issue for me so I know that, if and when I have to take this computer for an upgrade or repair, installing at least four more gigs of ram (eight more at most) will be a priority (on top of replacing the SSD).

I have scanned the disk a few times recently. Results came out clean. I have programs to block trojans like this. Plus I'd probably see some sort of Chia trojan in Process Explorer, which I should probably stop using because every time I type here, I see that Firefox writes about a megabyte a second so that's filling me with dread.

That said, I compared the writes to my laptop, which had a SDHD (hybrid drive). Since it has the qualities of an SSD + it's the only drive in the computer, I figured that'd be a good litmus to see how much punishment I normally dole out to my computer. Turns out it did about 26-27 TB throughout its almost three year life.

Between this and seeing that putting the computer in a hybrid sleep (said to be bad for SSDs) barely put a dent in the Total Host Write count, I'm starting to realize that, yeah, this is pretty normal for my SSD and that I'm just freaking out. In other words, I learned to stop worrying and love the TBW.

I have done a few things to try to curb the writes, such as moving my games to the HDD and fiddling with Firefox's cache so it saves to the ram instead, but for the most part, I think I did all I can and the best I can do now is wait and save.

Also,how full is the SSD? You should keep a absolute bare minimum of 10% free on newer SSDs. More for older SSDs.

170 GB. It'll probably be 174 once I move Hearthstone over to the HDD.

 

[ClapTrapper]

8 GB. Paging file is a bit of an issue for me so I know that, if and when I have to take this computer for an upgrade or repair, installing at least four more gigs of ram (eight more at most) will be a priority (on top of replacing the SSD).

I have scanned the disk a few times recently. Results came out clean. I have programs to block trojans like this. Plus I'd probably see some sort of Chia trojan in Process Explorer, which I should probably stop using because every time I type here, I see that Firefox writes about a megabyte a second so that's filling me with dread.

That said, I compared the writes to my laptop, which had a SDHD (hybrid drive). Since it has the qualities of an SSD + it's the only drive in the computer, I figured that'd be a good litmus to see how much punishment I normally dole out to my computer. Turns out it did about 26-27 TB throughout its almost three year life.

Between this and seeing that putting the computer in a hybrid sleep (said to be bad for SSDs) barely put a dent in the Total Host Write count, I'm starting to realize that, yeah, this is pretty normal for my SSD and that I'm just freaking out. In other words, I learned to stop worrying and love the TBW.

I have done a few things to try to curb the writes, such as moving my games to the HDD and fiddling with Firefox's cache so it saves to the ram instead, but for the most part, I think I did all I can and the best I can do now is wait and save.


170 GB. It'll probably be 174 once I move Hearthstone over to the HDD.

You have enough free space,but I bet your problem goes away with another 8 Gig. My Dell 2n1 had 8 Gig and was almost unusable until I upgraded to 16 Gig. Same with the HP M01-F1024 prebuilt I am using right now.
8 gig just doesn't seem to be enough with Win10 right now.

 

[James_369]

8 gig just doesn't seem to be enough with Win10 right now.

Yeah. Here's hoping the pre-builders get that memo and 16 GB Ram PCs become the norm to pick up at Best Buy.

 

[James_369]

4.6TB in only 633 hours....hmm.

Yeah, I spent some time closely monitoring the NVMe SSD... It doesn't play by anyone's rules.

Every once and a while, the Total Host Writes will go up by one... And that's it. Moving the 4 GB Hearthstone didn't affect it, putting it to sleep didn't effect it (though I turned off hybrid sleep for the time being), not even using Discord and Firefox seems to affect it.

It is so weird that I've decided to write it off as a "let it do its own thing".