Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

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This is bad advice imo. A SSD offers small capacity for a big price. It is a bad match for preserving data. Its advantage is its speed, especially in seek times, but also on read/write operations.

If one wants to “get his money back” the best way is to utilize the SSD to its fullest instead of trying to preserve it for ten years. Write on it as much as you can. Use it to make your system faster. Use it to hide your setup's shortcomings.

Couple years back, I had only 8GB of RAM on my system. The first thing I did when I got a SSD was to put the swap on it. The zero-seek times (compared to HDDs) made the dreaded swap operations almost imperceptible. What worths more? The SSD or the ability to do my work without hinders?

Other bad advice in the article:

  - Use noatime: this is old, use relatime.
  - Do not use btrfs: compression, deduplication, COW, snapshots etc are very useful for the small sized SSDs
  - Do not enable hibernation: Maybe we should return to windows '98
  - Disable browser cache: facepalm, just try browsing like this...

Ommited advice from the article:

  - Use part of the SSD as a cache for your HDDs (native support by LVM)

In short: do not try to protect your SSD. Try to kill it as fast as possible. :)

It's fine as long as people know what they are doing is ridiculous. I have a friend who both tries to hyper mile and as well as prevent any wear on his brakes on his Diesel VW Golf TDI. As in, his objective is to never, ever touch his brakes, or accelerate (significantly). He plans out his highway on-ramps to avoid sudden acceleration, rarely passes, and gauges stop-lights blocks in advance to reduce braking.

Is this needed in a modern car, or does it make driving said care more pleasurable, (or, for that matter, safe?) No, in call cases. But, he takes a particular pleasure about taking his vehicle into the dealer (free, once a year), and at 75,000 miles being told that his brakes look like they've got 10,000 miles on them.

So, if you read the advice on SSDs in this (ridiculous to some) vein, then It's a fun read.

Your friend's practice seems a bit excessive to me, though I can understand one adopting some good driving habits to reduce wear and increase mileage. It usually leads to more safe roads too, due to less aggressive driving behaviour.

A thing I can't understand are screen protectors used by people with an office job. The amount of R&D put into modern phones' screens and oleophobic coating is huge. Your phone's screen is designed to withstand both hits and dirt, to let your fingers slide with minimal friction and to allow you perceive every last pixel of your QHD panel (which has its own huge amount of R&D). Why would you miss all these by gluing a $5 piece of plastic on top of it?

> Why would you miss all these by gluing a $5 piece of plastic on top of it?

Some of us prefer matte, non-mirror screens.

Especially as those are also more fat-resistant. And read better in sunlight. <3 matte screens.

The practice of hypermiling is about burning less fuel to reach your destination. Likewise, avoiding unnecessary braking saves on replacement costs. It's certainly not needed for any car, but it saves money.

I agree! Many of the SSD "tweaks" mentioned are unnecessary and seem to originate from the early days of consumer SSDs (2007-early 2009). For some bizarre reason they still perpetuate and I am not sure why.

Disabling the browser cache is a good example. Back then we had many drives based on JMicron's infamous JMF602 controller such as the G.Skill Titan and Apex, Core v2 & Solid from OCZ. Once thing these all had in common were incredibly poor random 4KB write latencies of between 0.5-2 seconds [1][2] which understandably lead to frequent pauses or stuttering in the operating system. The general advice in these cases was to move the browser cache to a HDD or RAM disk in addition to disabling or moving the pagefile. I am not sure why but many people seemed happy with this solution. If I had purchased an SSD that exhibited this problem I would have returned it to the place of purchase for a full refund since they clearly weren't fit for purpose and shouldn't have been sold in the first place!

Item 17 isn't true [3]. Windows 7 onwards will detect solid state drives and will make the necessary adjustments itself (including disabling defrag just for the SSD). What many of these guides fail to mention is that if you completely disable defrag you are also disabling the automatic defragmentation of any HDDs that are connected to the same computer. Also, in Windows 8.x/10 the defrag tool now deals with storage optimization and does a lot more than defragging such as sending TRIM hints to SSDs [2][3] so you definitely don't want to disable that.

If you have cloned a Windows install from a HDD to an SSD you can force Windows to detect the drive as an SSD by running the following from an elevated Command Prompt (although WinSAT will run without any user input eventually):

    winsat formal -restart clean

One reason for disabling hibernation was because SSDs were small (< 64GB) and the hiberfil.sys in Windows would take up a non-trivial amount of disk space if you had a PC with 4GB-8GB RAM. These days it's a non-issue since capacities are larger and the as The Tech Report have proven, it takes a lot of effort to wear out an SSD. Also, if you are using Windows 8.0 onwards disabling hibernation will also disable the fast startup feature.

Another very recent myth is that SSDs will lose data in as little as 7 days if left in a powered-off state [5]. Thankfully this has been thoroughly debunked [6].

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/17

[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/7

[3] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWin...

[4] http://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/19/why-weekly-defrags-are-turn...

[5] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-da...

[6] http://anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-rete...

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