IMHO, the SSD is there to work for me. Yes, temp files and swap file on the SSD will put more wear on it, but doing work and, if necessary, wearing out is what it's there for. Clean out the temp directory regularly; some poorly-behaved programs leave a lot behind in there.
Thank you, this post actually made the most sense to me out of everything I've been reading online. Seems like a lot of people have outdated ideas about SSDs. A lot of people are afraid of using it and I'm kinda wondering why bother getting one then? Granted SSD back then were crazily expensive, but in today's world, I got a Mushkin 250GB NVMe for $40.
I have been dreaded for days now about heating problems, endurance issues, what to put on the SSD and what not, and in the final end seems like modern SSD don't care about any of that b/c of better hardware and firmware. There's a pretty intense endurance test report that showed many of the 150 TBW endurance start to fail only after writing 600TB, some reaching 1PB and even 2PB.
https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/
So I'm putting in a M.2 2280 NVMe into a ultra thin HP Envy 15. The HP laptops are pre-designed to use the SSD either as a 2nd drive or a cache drive, or both, but not a boot drive as it is very difficult to get it to become a boot drive. But I think it is actually better not to use the SSD as a boot drive either and I think people who do afraid to use the drive b/c their OS is on it.
What I'm planning is.
1) Using Intel RST, give up 50-64GB of the 250GB SSD as acceleration cache. By default 18.6GB will be reserved for Win 10 OS, this practically means only the boot files are on the HDD while everything else from Win 10 will be cached on the SSD. Then the remaining cache will be used to speed up all the other programs installed on the HDD.
https://www.wepc.com/tips/ssd-cache/
According to the test above, the cache is enough to make those programs perform near identical as simply installing them on the SSD. So it is not even necessary to re-install those programs on the SSD. In fact it is better not to and simply use the SSD as a cache to wear it out and just replace if it does fail without have to worry about reinstalling anything.
2) Then I was thinking about whether to put the pagefiles, temp folder, and even browser cache on there. Again, many suggest SSDs don't like being written to and it shortens their lifespan, but others suggest common usage is negligible compare to the life expectancy of the SSD especially with the firmware these days that spread out the write to balance out the cells.
According to Microsoft's own page, it is recommended the pagefile be put on the SSD since the read to write ratio is 40:1
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/e7/support-and-qa-for-solid-state-drives
The only problem I ran into is the hiberfil.sys cannot be moved, thus will still be on the HDD and so restoring from hibernation time will not be reduced much.
Also, some people reported corrupted installation programs such as Onedrive etc... that might put GBs of writing into the temp folder or Spotify caching problems.
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/7exxi7/wtf_my_ssd_is_filled_with_297gb_of_temporary_files/
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1319660-so-are-firefox-and-chrome-still-killing-ssds/
But I think those things are pretty rare. Google support forum recommend putting the cache on SSD. But there are still some issues with Firefox. So I have to rethink this one or anyone else can offer more info, greatly appreciate it.
https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0rkXAt47LoEI/?hl=en&gpf=#!topic/chrome/rkXAt47LoEI
https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/
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And finally, power and heating issues. Most NVMe are 2.7/2.8A at 9/10W. However, non-DRAM SSD using HMB greatly reduces the power consumption.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mushkin-helix-l-nvme-ssd
This is the one I got and it runs max at 4.5W and average at 2.15W or 0.65A!!