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Re: Measuring (or calculating) how many bytes are actually written to disk when I repeatedly save a file



On 08.04.2019 19:56, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, April 08, 2019 10:18:28 AM Curt wrote:
On 2019-04-08, rhkramer@gmail.com <rhkramer@gmail.com> wrote:
And someone would (or should) ask what does "frequently" mean, and that
is what I am trying to quantify.
Sure. But below a certain level of granularity it becomes an exercise
for which the benefits remain to be established.  Large files and
frequent writes to disk are probably not ideal for an SSD. You can read
that anywhere. What else can anyone say? 
I've seen that implied, but not explicitly stated, nor with "quantification" 
(i.e., supporting evidence).

What are you trying to do?
Measure the daily byte-count of your writes and compare that to some
hypothetical standard or threshold above which it would be suggested to
employ an HDD rather than a SSD?
As mentioned in another post, I am starting to fear for the reilability of an 
HDD (DOAs, early failures, unwilingness of the vendor / manufacturer to 
provide a warranty), and, therefore, I am trying to determine if an SSD could 
be a better choice.

(Someday, I expect it will be -- is that day here?)


Don't know if it is appropriate, but you should begin to treat any media (HDD, SSD, etc) as consumables.
You can't expect some device will work for any amount of time and won't fail. They all fail. Even tanks fail.
Any media could fail for sooo many different reasons and nobody can predict them all. You have to be always prepared for the moment when that happens, basically
by asking yourself this question: "What will I do if my current disk will fail right at this moment and there will be no possibility to recover any data from it?"
If your answer is: "I will replace it and restore my data from backup on another device and probably loose a day worth of work." Then you're fine.
But if your answer is: "This is not happening..This is not happening..This is not happening.." Then it's a huge problem, and it has nothing to do with device's reliability or type.
So stop fearing and perform regular backups.

That said, personally I can't imagine a PC without a SSD or NVMe drive nowadays. Even more if it is a laptop.
SSDs are relatively cheap, super fast and became more reliable, than they were a few years ago. Firmwares got better, controller ICs got better.
HDDs has their uses too and they mostly used for storage capacity, in workstations, NAS devices and servers with RAID for redundancy.
If your fear is about warranty and RMA then buy devices from well known brands and from your local PC hardware store. Everything else is mitigated by backups.

-- 
With kindest regards, Alexander.

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