A small advice to SSD owners,

Development Rendering
1

Hi everyone. Something happened with me lately which I did not know about till late and wanted to share.

I have an SSD for the Windows C partition. The mistake I did was to put the paging file on the SSD. I was surprised that the Samsung software of the SSD tells me it has 4 TB of written data, even though it was much lower a months or so. I discovered while I was doing some UE4 lightbuilding yesterday that the lightmass builder is using the page file extensively. I got to know that the reason of that nearly two terabytes that were written in the past month or so was the fact that I was doing some light tests! I keep my system sometimes 24 hours working on lighting testing large lightmap sizes.

As you know, an SSD has a limited number of write cycles. So I disabled paging on the C drive and moved the paging file to some other normal hard drive.

I think most of you are experienced and know this fact, but I wanted to share my experience because I am also sure many of the newbies are going to shorten the lives of their expensive SSDs this way.

Best regards

2

It’s always good to keep a backup. I mostly use linux. It doesnt page file. Biggest issue is with plug ins between win, and linux.

3

I thought that wear out is non issue now, even 24/7 read write operations continuously for years do not wear SSD out?

I do not have SSD yet but i have considered to buy as unreliable times are over(should be as far i have seen news)

graphicsgriffin: how old is your SSD and what company?

4

This 850 Pro from Samsung lasted 9,100,000GB, or 9100TB (9.1 Petabytes). I read most drives lasted at least 2 Petabytes before crapping out. So should be okay even if you bake lights every day, at least until you have to upgrade again…
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/end…of-writes.html

5

It’s a Samsung EVO 850 500GB. I don’t think the speed difference for page filing between SSD and HDD will be huge though even SSDs are much faster. What do you think?

6

Currently, 70-100 TB of writes is anticipated for every ~128GB of drive space. IIRC, the EVO 500 is rated for around 320TB of writes. You’re going to need to hit it quite hard if you want to kill it within the decade.

The Samsung Pro is more expensive than the EVO and increased endurance is one of its features. Other brands also offer hardy premium drives. And in the future, Xpoint(?) memory could yield even hardier drives. Though, I suspect large (1TB+) drives already have enough flash memory to outlast the rest of their parts.

7

Yeah, I think the EVO is not that durable compared to the PRO.

Problem is that in one rendering session it wrote like a couple hundreds of gigabytes. and also the writing rate wasn’t high, means maybe an HDD wont be that slower. If it writes 10 megabytes per second and renders for 10 hours only using paging file it’s =
10606010=360,000 , nearly 300 gigabytes. I think that’s a lot if you are continuously testing your lighting. means in a month 9 TB (assuming you only render 10 hours a day)
in a year that’s 912= 108 TB.
Of course I wouldn’t be rendering all year round, but still at a certain time of development I think I will have to keep testing the lighting for a couple of months at least and 24 hours round.

I don’t know, mostly I will upgrade to a new system with 128 GB of RAM, sometime next year maybe because these are somewhat expensive.

8

You need more ram if your SSD is getting “pagefiled” that hard while building lighting.

9

Thanks for the tip, been using SSD for few months only. It’s a good idea to keep a copy of your entire work not only online on the server but a hard copy next to you on a mobile drive (portable HHD drive). 250GB drive is not that expensive, yet can save your butt if the worst case scenario happens.