Will downloading movies and tv shows onto my SSD reduce its life expectancy?

[wsk2450]

I just bought a 240gb SSD for my laptop.

I will never fill up the SSD. But, I always download movies and tv shows when they come out. After I watch them, I will transfer them to my external hard drive. Will the SSD life span shorten due to the constant downloading?

Thanks

 

[bluebob951]

Well we don't condone Illegal downloading of movies and tv shows on here, streaming them is your best option. Yes it will shorten the life span, the high number of writes will eventually lead to its death. I would set default download location to your external drive.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I just bought a 240gb SSD for my laptop.

I will never fill up the SSD. But, I always download movies and tv shows when they come out. After I watch them, I will transfer them to my external hard drive. Will the SSD life span shorten due to the constant downloading?

Thanks

Every user I have build for says they will never fill up their SSD....half were back in 6 months asking me to clean it out.

There is no benefit to downloading multimedia data to the SSD as opposed to a HD.

 

[wsk2450]

Well we don't condone Illegal downloading of movies and tv shows on here, streaming them is your best option. Yes it will shorten the life span, the high number of writes will eventually lead to its death. I would set default download location to your external drive.

Thanks for your reply.

Is there an estimate in terms of how many Gigabytes of writing will it take for the SSD to eventually fail? I checked my SSD's SMART and it says "Host Writes (GB): 600" and "Host Reads (GB): 1321"

 

[The Original Ralph]

check with your mfgr - it's lifespan is usually expressed in terms of TB written. Iirc, the earlier models were rated at 72 TB, with some of the newer models going as high as 500+ TB -

and fyi, i've been using an old samsung 810 256 GB SSD (810 was a dell oem model), it's 4 years old now - i've been using it to download and render videos to, as i use it as my "work table drive" and been using it like that for 2 years and it's doing fine. One thing i do do though, is try to fill it entirely before i wipe it or erase the video files, so the same cells aren't being written to constantly, ie share the load with all the cells

fwiw

 

[wsk2450]

check with your mfgr - it's lifespan is usually expressed in terms of TB written. Iirc, the earlier models were rated at 72 TB, with some of the newer models going as high as 500+ TB -

and fyi, i've been using an old samsung 810 256 GB SSD (810 was a dell oem model), it's 4 years old now - i've been using it to download and render videos to, as i use it as my "work table drive" and been using it like that for 2 years and it's doing fine. One thing i do do though, is try to fill it entirely before i wipe it or erase the video files, so the same cells aren't being written to constantly, ie share the load with all the cells

fwiw

Thanks for your reply.

I bought this SSD almost a month ago: http://ocz.com/consumer/arc-100-sata-3-ssd

I can't really find where it says how many TB of writes it's expected to last. Can you tell me what it is?

Also, I don't understand your last part. Are you saying I should fill up my SSD and then transfer all of the movies and shows to my external hard drive once it is almost full rather than transferring files one by one?

Thanks again.

 

[Bezzell]

As per this test. Any SSD will be long obsolete and in the bottom of your closet before you can ever kill it with data transfers. Unless you're planning on writing data to it at 500mb per second, 24 hours a day for a year and a half.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

 

[wsk2450]

As per this test. Any SSD will be long obsolete and in the bottom of your closet before you can ever kill it with data transfers. Unless you're planning on writing data to it at 500mb per second, 24 hours a day for a year and a half.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

What other factors other than writing files to SSD can cause the SSD to eventually fail?

 

[Bezzell]

I don't know. Smashing it with a hammer, power surge, getting a lemon?

 

[The Original Ralph]

check with your mfgr - it's lifespan is usually expressed in terms of TB written. Iirc, the earlier models were rated at 72 TB, with some of the newer models going as high as 500+ TB -

and fyi, i've been using an old samsung 810 256 GB SSD (810 was a dell oem model), it's 4 years old now - i've been using it to download and render videos to, as i use it as my "work table drive" and been using it like that for 2 years and it's doing fine. One thing i do do though, is try to fill it entirely before i wipe it or erase the video files, so the same cells aren't being written to constantly, ie share the load with all the cells

fwiw

Thanks for your reply.

I bought this SSD almost a month ago: http://ocz.com/consumer/arc-100-sata-3-ssd

I can't really find where it says how many TB of writes it's expected to last. Can you tell me what it is?

Also, I don't understand your last part. Are you saying I should fill up my SSD and then transfer all of the movies and shows to my external hard drive once it is almost full rather than transferring files one by one?

Thanks again.

no - transfer them when you want, i simply do not erase them from the SSD until it's nearly full, usually when the drive in "my computer" is showing a red line or bar, indicating it's past 90% full. If you erase every file after you transfer then on the next write you're just writing to the same cells, and constantly doing that causes unbalanced wear on the drive. Read the article Bezzell linked to and do your own research on the subject as well

 

[wsk2450]

I don't know. Smashing it with a hammer, power surge, getting a lemon?

check with your mfgr - it's lifespan is usually expressed in terms of TB written. Iirc, the earlier models were rated at 72 TB, with some of the newer models going as high as 500+ TB -

and fyi, i've been using an old samsung 810 256 GB SSD (810 was a dell oem model), it's 4 years old now - i've been using it to download and render videos to, as i use it as my "work table drive" and been using it like that for 2 years and it's doing fine. One thing i do do though, is try to fill it entirely before i wipe it or erase the video files, so the same cells aren't being written to constantly, ie share the load with all the cells

fwiw

Thanks for your reply.

I bought this SSD almost a month ago: http://ocz.com/consumer/arc-100-sata-3-ssd

I can't really find where it says how many TB of writes it's expected to last. Can you tell me what it is?

Also, I don't understand your last part. Are you saying I should fill up my SSD and then transfer all of the movies and shows to my external hard drive once it is almost full rather than transferring files one by one?

Thanks again.

no - transfer them when you want, i simply do not erase them from the SSD until it's nearly full, usually when the drive in "my computer" is showing a red line or bar, indicating it's past 90% full. If you erase every file after you transfer then on the next write you're just writing to the same cells, and constantly doing that causes unbalanced wear on the drive. Read the article Bezzell linked to and do your own research on the subject as well

This might be a silly question but does watching movies and tv shows online still write to the SSD? I know it's not getting saved to it but I noticed my SSDs SMART showed an increase in "Host Writes in GB" when I wasn't even downloading anything?

 

[The Original Ralph]

that i can't answer, but i'll hazard a guess that that's going to RAM and not the SSD

honestly, you're worrying about something that truly isn't worth worrying about

again, i'm using a 4+ yr (i pulled the receipt, purch'd feb 2011), that for the past 2+ years i have been rendering video files to. ie i use it as my "worktable" drive. From it i move the videos to two HDDs, one for backup storage and the other for use in my RV. I do 2-3 BluRay movies a week, which range from 18-38 GB in size, plus too many tv episodes to count - for example since Sunday i've recorded two seasons of Orphan Black, Turn: Washington spies 2 hour 2nd season premiere (7.2 GB), the entire first season of Marvel's Daredevils (22.4 GB), a few episodes of Battle Creek, and 6 episodes of Wolf Hall (BBC UK series). That's a typical Monday-Thursday scenario for me. And with all that, for over 2 years, i have less than 6 TB of video files saved. That should give you an idea, that even at the low end of 72 TB, you've got a lot of video recording to do and i'd suspect your unit is above that 72 GB limit in terms of lifespan

point is, i'm not a light user, and this is a samsung 810 which was the first gen sammy SSD and it's not showing any signs of corrupted data, the samsung magician software is showing it's in "good" health (that's all sammy tells you,. good or i guess bad, as i haven't seen anything but the "good" rating.

You're not going to wear that thing out during it's warranty -if you do, you'll RMA it. But by the time warranty is up, you'll be upgrading to a hotter setup - the technology is getting crazy

don't sweat wearing it out

 

[popatim]

Years ago (and 1274 runtime hours later) I put a 500gb Samsung 840 (pre-evo) into my gaming laptop that I take to work. I have streamed thousands of shows and movies (streaming still writes to the ssd as a buffer), played many many hours of frequently updated games, and I just checked.

Its Health is at 99%, Life at 99%, Wear leavinging at 99 (down 1 from 100), and not a single reported/detected issue. Not even a read or write retry. Looks like I have 100 more years before I wear out this drive.

I have to agree with Ralph, this is a non-issue. You will think its too small long before you wear it out. (I've been eyeing 1tb sized ones myself) LoL

ps & off-topic, I hope you guys are checking out the new Daredevil series on Netflix 🙂

 

[wsk2450]

that i can't answer, but i'll hazard a guess that that's going to RAM and not the SSD

honestly, you're worrying about something that truly isn't worth worrying about

again, i'm using a 4+ yr (i pulled the receipt, purch'd feb 2011), that for the past 2+ years i have been rendering video files to. ie i use it as my "worktable" drive. From it i move the videos to two HDDs, one for backup storage and the other for use in my RV. I do 2-3 BluRay movies a week, which range from 18-38 GB in size, plus too many tv episodes to count - for example since Sunday i've recorded two seasons of Orphan Black, Turn: Washington spies 2 hour 2nd season premiere (7.2 GB), the entire first season of Marvel's Daredevils (22.4 GB), a few episodes of Battle Creek, and 6 episodes of Wolf Hall (BBC UK series). That's a typical Monday-Thursday scenario for me. And with all that, for over 2 years, i have less than 6 TB of video files saved. That should give you an idea, that even at the low end of 72 TB, you've got a lot of video recording to do and i'd suspect your unit is above that 72 GB limit in terms of lifespan

point is, i'm not a light user, and this is a samsung 810 which was the first gen sammy SSD and it's not showing any signs of corrupted data, the samsung magician software is showing it's in "good" health (that's all sammy tells you,. good or i guess bad, as i haven't seen anything but the "good" rating.

You're not going to wear that thing out during it's warranty -if you do, you'll RMA it. But by the time warranty is up, you'll be upgrading to a hotter setup - the technology is getting crazy

don't sweat wearing it out

You're right, I'll stop worrying. Thanks for your reply

 

[wsk2450]

Years ago (and 1274 runtime hours later) I put a 500gb Samsung 840 (pre-evo) into my gaming laptop that I take to work. I have streamed thousands of shows and movies (streaming still writes to the ssd as a buffer), played many many hours of frequently updated games, and I just checked.

Its Health is at 99%, Life at 99%, Wear leavinging at 99 (down 1 from 100), and not a single reported/detected issue. Not even a read or write retry. Looks like I have 100 more years before I wear out this drive.

I have to agree with Ralph, this is a non-issue. You will think its too small long before you wear it out. (I've been eyeing 1tb sized ones myself) LoL

ps & off-topic, I hope you guys are checking out the new Daredevil series on Netflix 🙂

Thanks for your reply and yea I'll stop worrying now. I'm on episode 3 of daredevil and already addicted to it lol

 

[popatim]

I find it amazing how good some of these online only shows are. I'm wishing they had gotten this guy to play batman instead of Afleck...