Bad bad software to install on an SSD...
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I'm interested in hearing your opinions, but my top candidates are:
- MMORPGs, especially ones that have frequent patches
- BOINC, which is like an MMORPG that has multi-megabyte patches multiple times per day or even per hour, depending on the project you're using and the performance of your machine.
Do not install BOINC on an SSD. Just don't.
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@Steve_The_Cynic More specifically, do not let it put its data directory on an SSD.
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Huh? Why not?
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FYI, modern SSDs have much better durability than the ones from 7 years ago. Most drives are rated for one petabyte of writes or more.
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@MrL Because the game tries to augment the audio experience by playing some of the music on the HDD read head? You'd lose half the experience? ...Is what it sounds like.
Also sounds like you'd get speed benefits from an SSD, if you can spring for a drive that can take it. Or ramdisk or tmpfs, if the game were to run on Linux, I guess, but I doubt it.
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Ooh! You could put the game data directory on a Samba share that uses tmpfs as backing.
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@MrL said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
Huh? Why not?
Because SSDs fail if you write enough to them. You'd have to write an awful lot to get there with modern ones, but you could (in theory) make one fail quickly.
For example, Samsung warranties their recent SSDs to work for 150 Terabytes Written per 250 GB capacity. To reach that in a year on a 250 GB drive you'd have to write ~411 GB per day. That's a lot of BOINCing. ;)
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@Gąska said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
FYI, modern SSDs have much better durability than the ones from 7 years ago. Most drives are rated for one petabyte of writes or more.
Sure, but BOINC really hammers them, because each work unit is packaged in a small VM image, except some of the newer ones that seem to be leaning toward Docker, and that VM image is discarded once the work unit completes. (Er, that's right, it's questionable design, but it's what they built, and it's not totally questionable, since it means that the code environment of the work unit is independent of, say, the host operating system.)
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@Parody said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
@MrL said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
Huh? Why not?
Because SSDs fail if you write enough to them. You'd have to write an awful lot to get there with modern ones, but you could (in theory) make one fail quickly.
More specifically, a lot more quickly than if you tell BOINC to stash the work units on a spinning rust drive.
For example, Samsung warranties their recent SSDs to work for 150 Terabytes Written per 250 GB capacity. To reach that in a year on a 250 GB drive you'd have to write ~411 GB per day. That's a lot of BOINCing. ;)
My new CPU is an i9 10980XE, eighteen cores of hyperthreaded goodness, and piles through work units at a surprising rate. Some of the projects have work units that complete in only a few minutes each, and this CPU can therefore crank through hundreds of them per hour... (Thirty six in parallel, five or six minutes each ...)
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Where else do you want to put stuff, though? I got rid of the spinning rust in the machine a while ago. I've got two hard drives in an external enclosure/NAS, but with gigabit ethernet, the bandwidth sucks even more than that of just the drives themselves.
What kind of amounts of data written do you get with the above stuff? I have an SSD from 2015 (boot drive for Windows ever since), and I'm far from the limits (about 30 TBW, which is still a comfortable way away from the mfg's specced 150 TBW limit).
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@Parody I will just add that SSDs have a minimum page size. Controllers these days have magic in them to reduce that, but those cosmic sequential speeds mostly come from large pages.
Lots of small writes and deletes will increase the actual TBW faster.
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I went full SSD 2 years ago with 3 disks, two SATA one NVMe. I have everything installed/stored on them - system, programming tools, games, data, multimedia, everything.
Their currentTBW limits usage: 8%, 6%, 6%.
So...
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@acrow said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
Ooh! You could put the
gamedata directory on a Samba sharethat uses tmpfs as backing.Sadly, this is usually the first question I ask users when they complain that my software is slow. And even more sadly, despite this being documented and told to everyone, almost every user does the mistake at least once (though to be fair, that's partly because our IT infrastructure makes that easier than the alternative).
I have a sad.
More relevant (?) to the thread, we managed to get IT to buy a few TB of SSDs for one computer more or less dedicated to that software, and it's working wonderfully. When people remember to use them.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
MMORPGs, especially ones that have frequent patches
It's been at least 7 years since I moved my main PC (notably including my world of warcraft installation) to an SSD. For the huge performance increase it brought me, I'd gladly buy a new SSD every other year (but I haven't needed to).
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@PleegWat said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
MMORPGs, especially ones that have frequent patches
It's been at least 7 years since I moved my main PC (notably including my world of warcraft installation) to an SSD. For the huge performance increase it brought me, I'd gladly buy a new SSD every other year (but I haven't needed to).
Fair point. I cited MMORPGs because they are probably the most write-to-disky things that a lot of people see, but dwarfed into insignificance next to BOINC.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
I cited MMORPGs because they are probably the most write-to-disky things that a lot of people see
Try your browser for far more write-to-disk-yness. The cache and the cookie store churn things a lot; the writes are small, but they're very frequent.
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A pagefile. Especially if your system actually needs it.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
A pagefile. Especially if your system actually needs it.
WAL for most things with real persistence guarantees
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My Minecraft knowledge is almost a decade out of date, but does it still store your saved worlds as thousands of tiny files?
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@hungrier said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
My Minecraft knowledge is almost a decade out of date, but does it still store your saved worlds as thousands of tiny files?
And ... does it still occasionally forget to load parts of the world?
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@cvi One time when I was playing on a server with some friends, we played a prank on one guy by completely clearing out a large square block of terrain to make it look like an unloaded chunk, then convincing him to walk into it and fall to the bottom
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@hungrier said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
@cvi One time when I was playing on a server with some friends, we played a prank on one guy by completely clearing out a large square block of terrain to make it look like an unloaded chunk, then convincing him to walk into it and fall to the bottom
Bonus points if it was actually on a chunk line for realism.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
@hungrier said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
@cvi One time when I was playing on a server with some friends, we played a prank on one guy by completely clearing out a large square block of terrain to make it look like an unloaded chunk, then convincing him to walk into it and fall to the bottom
Bonus points if it was actually on a chunk line for realism.
It was actually (deliberately) not even the right size, and we had put coloured wool at the bottom that almost-but-not-quite matched the skybox colour (and of course wouldn't match it at a different time of day), so he could have theoretically figured it out if he looked carefully
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@hungrier TDWTF Minecraft server (RIP) had a lot of mods installed. The one I was developing had invisible blocks, intangible blocks, and damaging blocks.
I let the hosting lapse because no one was using it.
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@error said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
no one was using it.
aka the Firefox development model
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@dkf said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Bad bad software to install on an SSD...:
I cited MMORPGs because they are probably the most write-to-disky things that a lot of people see
Try your browser for far more write-to-disk-yness. The cache and the cookie store churn things a lot; the writes are small, but they're very frequent.
Fair point. I hadn't thought of that aspect of things.
Write amplification - Wikipedia
