Most durable nvme m.2?

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denywinarto

Active Member
Aug 11, 2016
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I got a server running m.2 DC p4511 as OS disk,
which has Power loss protection and High Endurance Technology, and from my previous experience with intel SSD drive, HET drive can sustain heavy write
But it doesnt seem to be the case for the M.2 version,
few hours ago my server crashed, saying there's corrupted drive,
fortunately i kept daily backup.
So i restored the backup, but now sentinel says the drive is now 99%, only after 76 days of usage.

I'm wondering what's causing the health to drop so fast?
Is it because it's a 3d TLC instead of MLC?
It's a media server, the high-write apps i could think of are emby radarr and sonarr, unfortunately those 3 don't allow installation on different drive. (at least not officially) There is also ut(orrent, blueiris, chrome, qbittorent, but i dont think they write too frequently.
Also strangely the crash happened not long after macrium completed it's daily backup, but i think macrium backup is read activity

Any alternative that is more durable? Tried samsung 970 before and it was worse than this (died twice).
Has to be nvme cause i need high read.

Edit : here's the sentinel stats of DC p4511

Transfer Rate Information
Total Data Read,"930,023 MB, 33,729,218 MB since installation (8/23/2019)"
Total Data Write,"47,435 MB, 67,124,669 MB since installation"
Average Reads Per Day,"81,668.81 MB"
Average Writes Per Day,"162,529.46 MB"
Current Transfer Rate,"255,746 KB/s"
Average Transfer Rate,"253,344 KB/s"
Maximum Transfer Rate,"598,562 KB/s"
Current Read Rate,"251,615 KB/s"
Current Write Rate,"4,131 KB/s"
Current Disk Activity,100 %
Average Disk Activity,100.00 %
Estimated Max. Transfer Rate,"598,562 KB/s [520x DVD Write Speed]"

Power on time is 76 days,
I think the average write is still below the specs limit (500ish gb)
 
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i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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There is also utorrent, blueiris, chrome, qbittorent, but i dont think they write too frequently.
Why two torrent clients?
They don't have to write frequently: ssds write data in pages (2,4,8 and 16 KByte) to the nand. If a torrent is split into smaller chunks the controller on the ssds will amplify it to a page size.

The best is probably the intel px4801 with 375 GByte capacity and at least 41 PByte write endurance. (And it costs in europe now about 700€ :p)
 

denywinarto

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Aug 11, 2016
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Why two torrent clients?
They don't have to write frequently: ssds write data in pages (2,4,8 and 16 KByte) to the nand. If a torrent is split into smaller chunks the controller on the ssds will amplify it to a page size.

The best is probably the intel px4801 with 375 GByte capacity and at least 41 PByte write endurance. (And it costs in europe now about 700€ :p)
Thanks will look into it, tried using utorrent only before but it was crashing too often, so i split it into 2 download clients.
 

denywinarto

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Aug 11, 2016
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970 Pro, or anything Optane.

Also, rTorrent or Deluge.
I did try 970, it failed twice within a year.

Anyways, i ran task manager and apparently explorer.exe and system takes the top2 spots.



No wonder it killed my 970 twice,
it's a server 2019 connected to jbod rack with 200tb, i'm using drivepool.
Any thoughts of what could windows possibly do to write that much?
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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Your screenshot shows under 200GB in writes, which is nothing. Losing 1% health after 76 days is also not something to worry about. Means you have ~21 years to go before it hits 0.
 

denywinarto

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Aug 11, 2016
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Your screenshot shows under 200GB in writes, which is nothing. Losing 1% health after 76 days is also not something to worry about. Means you have ~21 years to go before it hits 0.
Actually total tb written is 64tb for 76 days, that translates into about 0.8tb daily write
 
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EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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Fire up procexp and turn on the IO columns and let it run for a few days, it'll show you which processes are reading and writing the most in terms of raw kB. If you want more detail, perfmon should be able to tell you which are issuing the most IOs.

I'm a little surprised to see chrome running on a server. As an application, it's a pig and thrashes lots of small writes to your NAND even worse than firefox used to back in the day.
 

denywinarto

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Aug 11, 2016
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Fire up procexp and turn on the IO columns and let it run for a few days, it'll show you which processes are reading and writing the most in terms of raw kB. If you want more detail, perfmon should be able to tell you which are issuing the most IOs.

I'm a little surprised to see chrome running on a server. As an application, it's a pig and thrashes lots of small writes to your NAND even worse than firefox used to back in the day.
Just tried Procexp and perfmon but they neither seem to be able to monitor which app is writing to C drive exclusively.
procexp only monitors total write, and i can't find a way to include apps in perfmon's disk monitoring

But based on procexp it seems blue iris sonarr and radarr are the top suspects, i'm gonna try to update BI first, it's still on v4

I need a browser to open those web apps (sonarr, radarr, emby) and some web pages which i refresh on daily basis.
Also there are some chrome extensions that dont seem to have alternative in other browsers
 

Dreece

Active Member
Jan 22, 2019
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You can configure all browsers to reference their profile/cache storage in ram, it is something I done on my linux laptop and windows workstation. Just configure a ram drive and create some junctions in the profile data folders, leave the bookmarks and extension folders along with config folders on the drive though so you don't lose them on a reboot/crash. There are even apps out there which write the data back to the drive if you want persistence.

Rule of thumb - if something needs to thrash a drive for caching/storage of unimportant data, ram drive it... if you really wanted to, you can even image windows straight into a ram drive too, on reboot you always start with a nice clean image, just remember to update the drive image after updates/tweaks else you lose them obviously... again there are tonnes of fancy scripts all over the web that can help you achieve nirvana with your system drive.
 

denywinarto

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Aug 11, 2016
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You can configure all browsers to reference their profile/cache storage in ram, it is something I done on my linux laptop and windows workstation. Just configure a ram drive and create some junctions in the profile data folders, leave the bookmarks and extension folders along with config folders on the drive though so you don't lose them on a reboot/crash. There are even apps out there which write the data back to the drive if you want persistence.

Rule of thumb - if something needs to thrash a drive for caching/storage of unimportant data, ram drive it... if you really wanted to, you can even image windows straight into a ram drive too, on reboot you always start with a nice clean image, just remember to update the drive image after updates/tweaks else you lose them obviously... again there are tonnes of fancy scripts all over the web that can help you achieve nirvana with your system drive.
Thanks for the input dreece,
Good idea, but i'm not sure about apps other than chrome e.g sonarr radarr utorrent qbittorrent.
I dont think they're optimized for cache relocation yet
I've been thinking of symlink'ing those apps to drivepool instead, (or maybe to ramdisk?)
I will check softperfect's ramdisk, if it supports persistence i will give it a try.
 

denywinarto

Active Member
Aug 11, 2016
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Came across this, anyone tried it?
Was thinking of using Drivepool as destination cache, kinda odd i know to use slower drive,
but it should be more ideal cause i read somewhere HDD has better write cycle than SSD
I dont think ramdisk would retain data on sudden power loss / BSOD either btw,
 
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Dreece

Active Member
Jan 22, 2019
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Power-loss wise, that was the whole idea behind NVDimms, though the management layer needs to be designed to make use of NVDimms just like the special enterprise systems which utilise them.

Historically, hardware raid has been doing defer-writes since the very beginning, less head-movements was the gain = drive endurance.

Defer-writing is something quite a few SSDs already do internally with their separation of primary-storage tlc/mlc nand and their slc/dram buffers, most notably enterprise drives though top-end consumer drives have had the tech for a while, such as Samsung's Pro line I believe.

Remember, PrimoCache's audience is the consumer world, and in those cases the jargon-marketing is very attractive to owners of 'crap' SSD tech... as far as enterprise and the PC master-race are concerned, it's nothing new, our drives already do whatever it takes to keep endurance up.
 
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