This thread is mainly to avoid be buying a data grave or “known bad” components.
Storage
Drive
Capacity
Useage
boot
250GB
50%
game
1TB
85%
data&software
2TB
>90%
Projects/Scratch
1TB
60%
Hot Archive
4TB
80%
My plan would be to finally take the time to separate software from data (which would free up roughly 200GB on D&S and unite that with the game drive.
Since I have another NVMe slot (PCIe 3 or 4) slot on my motherboard: Is anyone here aware of a huge issue with the Kingston NV1 2TB model?
Prices are 150 to 230€ depending on retailer.
I would also throw another 4TB of spinning rust in to expand the Hot-Archive (probably a WD Gold because they are surprisingly cheap).
Memory
I am running into the 16GB limit of my installed memory quite often.
Anything wrong with Kingston Fury Renegade 2x 16GB 3600MHz? (KF436C16RB1K2/32)
I actually trust spinning disk HDD’s with important data more than SSD’s. Because when an SSD dies, it’s just gone. But when an HDD dies, you usually know it’s coming, and most of the time you can rescue your data.
Western Digital Gold and Ultrastar HDD drives are good. Get the drives that use HelioSeal tech if you can, they tend to be more robust in their construction as they are meant for datacenters. And if you are going to buy a WD hard drive, I suggest buying it straight from Western Digital The way they handle their warranties, if you buy it from them directly, they will honor the warranty from the time you bought the drive, not based on the manufacturing date. If you buy from amazon, they go by the manufacturing date, and that can take years off your warranty before you ever get it - if the drive has been sitting in a warehouse for a long time before you got it.
I only ever buy Samsung SSD’s. But I have not heard bad reports about Kingston SSD’s so that’s probably fine. (pick the ones with the longest warranties) If a company is willing to warranty their product, it’s because they don’t expect it to die within that period.
As for ram, the memory you chose sounds fine. Kingston memory has a decent reputation, and the speed you chose seems fine to me. I personally use GSkill ram, but Kingston is fine too. When it comes to ram, only buy RAM that has a lifetime warranty attached to it. (most of the good ram companies will warranty their ram for life)
That’s how I run my system currently. I use Western Digital HelioSeal gold and ultrastar drives to store important data, and I duplicate the data across two different HDD’s. Then the regular programs run off SSD’s.
That is a bit extreme though, for many many years I was able to pull my data off HDD’s as they were dying. I have data i’ve transferred from the computers i’ve used dating back to the mid 1980’s. Each time a drive was close to death, I would pull all the data off and move it to another drive.
This is a modified version of a file i’ve had since back then. I updated and resized it a few times over the years. But this picture comes from that era. It was not a gif originally. There’s a bit of a story behind that image. originally it was created by an algorithm from a pirate sharing software. Imagine that popping up and filling your entire screen in the 1980’s while you were waiting for your game to install. It was quite mesmerizing.
It has since been lost to the internet a few times. I still upload it now and again, and I use it as an avatar sometimes. There is another copy floating around that I know of, but it’s not the complete image. Ahh wait, I did find a full copy, seems someone else has it hosted as well. But it dates back to the 286/386 era.
Anyway - the story speaks to the durability of HDD’s and how they are a fairly safe way to store data. I don’t trust SSD’s with valuable data storage yet. Maybe if you had them in an array with many redundant drives… But I don’t.
Newer tech in SSD’s is not making them more durable, the reverse in fact.
But, they are quicker to backup, and as long as you kinda expect them to die any time, you can take steps to reduce the tradgedy. like you said, with redundancy (for uptime) or backups.
I had a sneaking suspicion there was a problem with newer SSD’s, i’ve seen several basically new ssd drives die within their first year of use in friends machines. It is troubling to see tech become less reliable. I would prefer the reverse of that. I want more durability wherever possible.
So far I have had good success with the Samsung EVO drives, I always pick the samsung drives with the most durability and longest warranties I can find. None of them has died on me yet. But I still don’t trust them. I recently picked up a Crucial 4tb drive to play around with, but the one they sent me was opened (the seal was broken on the box) so I am returning it - so I don’t have any personal experience with them yet.
That is fair, and I’m sure we all would, But, we would also like SSD’s in $0.10/GB
The QLC drives seem even better than that, but I don’t know how durable they really are…
The old days of $1/GB with SLC drives are mostly gone, so many of us can have a lot more flash in our systems than before, and the drives really are faster; look at the NVMe sticks: fast, high capacity, And performant.
If one manually over provisions, one can even offset the lifetime of the cells.
And with a heatsink on the controller, can mitigate thermal throttling.
[I need to look into that actually- the benefit for the controller being heatsinked vs deficit of memory chips.]
At the end of the day, the drives are scaling up in capacity, and down in price, and there is a trend away from durability.
Perhaps Optane, but I can;t say as I haven’t looked in to it much; the cells are rated to last much longer, but I don’t know about the rest of it.
Nor do I know if the whole product is being killed off / abandoned by Intel.
I think either Linus or Gamers Nexus did a video talking about that. I can’t remember exactly where I saw it. From what I gathered the controller needs to be cooled, but there appears to be an optimal operating temperature for the storage memory itself which likes to run a bit on the warm side. When the controller gets hot though, it just slows down the drive to prevent overheating. The long and the short of it was, don’t worry too much about trying to keep them cool unless they are throttling themselves due to heat. That was specifically for NVME drives.
I do have fans in my case specifically dedicated to moving air across the drive base though. And I did have a dead-spot in my case for the NVME on the motherboard that I had to address as enough heat was accumulating and not moving away quickly enough to keep the NVME drive performing smoothly.
From what I have heard, the benefit of buying from a manufacturer’s brand is that there is more of a guarantee of consistency that a given product will always be sold with the same NAND and the same controllers; so buying a Crucial (Micron) or SK Hynix brand SSD would be as good as Samsung from that perspective.
In many ways though, I would imagine it is more important to avoid QLC than any particular manufacturer, even third party ones.
SSD End of Life
As far as SSD death is concerned, is not there usually is a counter in SMART that shows some form of wear information?
Either unusable blocks or bytes written could give you a sense of where you are in its life. I remember there was a multi-year SSD write test that ran until the drives permanently died; I think the conclusion was that there was ample warning in most cases before true failure,
In theory my ideal would be to (after some initial testing/wear-in) use a drive until some multiple of its warrantied TBW rating, then switch to using it for low-importance re-downloadable, or lose-able data until it actually dies.
The expensive ideal would of course be to set up something with ZFS and multiple drive error recovery.
SSD Unpowered Retention
One thing I sadly see brought up vary rarely is the possibility of not-wear-induced bit rot. I have no good source at the moment for how long a given drive or particular cell type (2-bit MLC vs 3-bit MLC (TLC) vs 4-bit MLC (QLC)) can last sitting on the shelf unpowered without losing data.
Since the famously long-lasting format of digital tape is, like HDDs, magnetic, I would guess that mature CMR HDD storage would have better retention than SSDs.
There is of course the caveat that old bearings in HDDs can lose lubrication or for some other reason seize up. Well retained magnetic data is of little help if you need to risk platter swapping to be able to spin it up.
One of the very first hard drives I had was a 20mb drive (yes 20mb) and it filled an entire 5&1/4 bay. In order to get it to spin I had to punch the drive to jog the platters enough to get the drive spinning when I started the computer. It was pretty hilarious. Very reliable drive besides needing a good punch every now and again
(I even found a picture of the first hard drive I had online)
I do not suggest whacking your spinning hard drives though to get them working. Mine was a very specific case and only happened because the drive wouldn’t spin on startup without a bit of a jiggle.
It was pretty hilarious - made me think of Han Solo in Star Wars punching the Millennium Falcon to get it to work.
The nice thing about HDD’s, even if they stop spinning entirely, you can send them to data recovery centers and often they can pull the data off. Louis Rossman offers a repair service specifically for data recovery, and his service is actually affordable. *data recovery centers will charge you thousands of dollars for the same service Rossman offers.
SSD’s do have lifespan tracking, I use a software called CrystalDiskInfo - Crystal Dew World [en] which keeps track of drive health. This particular software is free and has been around for quite a long time (since 2008). It was authored and is kept up to date by the original Japanese developer who wrote it initially. I have found it to be quite reliable for monitoring the health of drives.
Just to clarify and add some nuance, NAND flash cells are only temperature sensitive when writing, meaning that they will only wear down faster when writing at 25C than at 50C. Read operations are not affected by this, so I think it is inaccurate to say that NAND flash or NVMEs “like to run hot” when you are specifically referring only to write operations. Furthermore, it is entirely unclear how much this extra wear actually affects drive longevity, so I would still recommend using an appropriate cooling solution for your NVME drives.
I’ve been down this rabbit hole before, and as far as I can tell some internet journalist released a report around 2015 where he tested the write endurance of NAND flash cells on SATA SSDs at both 25C and 50C and found up to a 50% reduction of max TBW at the lower temps. The key distinction here being SATA speeds and not NVME. A few years later Gamers Nexus did a video referencing the original study and then a few years after that LTT did another video referencing both. But then about a year ago LTT snuck in a redaction of their original statements in the previous video into a non-related video and basically stated they couldn’t get anyone in the industry to corroborate or elaborate on any of this.
So either there’s a giant industry-wide conspiracy, or writing to NAND Flash at NVME speeds produces enough heat on it’s own to mitigate any of the unnecessary degradation. Heat sinks also work both ways and the excessive heat from the NVME controllers can also spread to the cooler NAND flash chips, potentially heating them up enough to also negate any of the extra wear. This last paragraph is speculation on my part, but I also think that most people don’t even come remotely close to 50% max TBW in general, so even if it is an issue most users won’t ever be affected either way and never know it was a problem in the first place.
I usually use smartmontools (cross-platform)
or hdparm (Linux-only) for drive info. I wonder if CrystalDisk____ uses smartmontools drive database, or if it has its own, or maybe does not use such a thing at all?
@Trooper_ish It appears that Samsung does still sell sizeable 2-bit MLC drives: 860 Pro and 970 Pro. The 860 Pro does say out of stock currently though…
Regarding Optane, @JunTrunko had mentioned in a thread a while ago that it has a three retention guarantee, but apparently that is standard for enterprise NAND as well.
I have never thought to look, I wonder what t he retention guarantees are for consumer NAND SSDs, assuming there are any. In theory, it might make sense to bin consumer drives for retention longevity, but I doubt anyone would actually bother doing that.
In that Optane thread I had laid out my dreams for long-lived data storage; in case others here would be amused by such daydreaming:
If you are worried about longevity of your SSDs, get one 8 TB Mech and one 2 TB NVMe, do a single backup write to the mech a day and leave the Mech mostly alone otherwise.
Yep, no RAM cache which will tank the random read/write performance.
True, but I was describing the thinking for limited space/hardware setup, where one drive is all you can have.
Personally, my desire is longevity, even at the cost of speed; I would still prefer to financially support a manufacturer that makes a storage device that lasts, and make that device last as long as possible. I would take reasonably-sized SLC without RAM caching at SATA speeds over PCIe 5-speed QLC any day.
