I would say it depends on how long you want your drive to last. We just purchased 2 128GB Samsung SSD drives for use with moving large files from one city to another on a weekly basis. After deep research through Samsung's specs and expected time before writing begins to fail (they actually have this documented) we decided we have plenty of time. I forget exactly how much data Samsung said you could write to it before it started having issues, but we calculated how long it would last for us (which reversing the calculation gives about 13TB of expected write life-time):
128GB drive. Average 70GB file written each week. Should last 3.5 years before Samsung states that we _might_ begin to see issues. 13TB at first glance didn't seem like much, but when we reconsidered the fact that this is a 128GB drive - that is a lot of data to write. To put it in perspective, my iMac desktop has been running for 57 days. In that time I have been doing a lot of VMware work, software development, e-mail (that does a lot of writes to disk) and encoded over 400 hours of video. This machine does not sit idle. I have written 2.44TB to disk since in those 57 days. Our e-mail server has been running for 17 days and processes about 100,000 e-mail messages a week. It has written a total of 493GB. Our database server (runs financials, time cards and some misc SQL databases) has been up for 17 days and has written 102GB. Our file server (we are a media heavy company so lots of video and large photoshop documents) runs AFP, DHCP, LDAP, Print server, Software Update server and some internal web pages. It has been up for 12 days and has written 551GB (it has read 5.94TB). One of our staff is a closer to a "normal user", meaning he does word documents, e-mail, that type of stuff. The one big thing he does is photoshop documents. His computer has been up for 51 days and written 126GB. One of our staff is a "minimal user", meaning I think he occasionally runs word. His computer has been up for 24 days and written 16GB. (It has read 49GB) So if you are planning to do video editing or working in Photoshop or any other "large file application" a lot, generally speaking an SSD may not be for you. If you are planning to use it as an "average user", you shouldn't have any problems. Bottom line, I doubt noatime is going to make a noticeable difference. So in the case of our minimum user (wrote 16GB, read 49GB), even if the drive had to re-write the entire file each time you accessed it, it would last 6,367 days before it had issues; or 17 years. Daniel Hazelbaker On Mar 11, 2011, at 6:13 AM, Neil Laubenthal wrote: > Never mind . . .I just discovered that it wasn't actually the modified date > that's changing but the last opened date (which is what shows up in a Finder > Find window rather than last modified date). > > I had noticed this date changing recently when I was searching for files in > support of my tax preparation and was irritated that the date was changing > (thinking it was the modified date). > > In any event . . .my real question was more about whether the last accessed > date writes that noatime prevents were worth turning off for an SSD or > whether the whole SSD wear issue was overblown . . .as I indicated before > there appear to be perfectly valid arguments on both sides and I'm not expert > enough in the details to determine which argument is wrong. > > > > > > On Mar 10, 2011, at 10:08 PM, LuKreme wrote: > >> Er… I have access to atime, ctime, mtime in find >> >> <http://www.unix.com/tips-tutorials/20526-mtime-ctime-atime.html> >> > > > ----------------------------------------------- > There are only three kinds of stress; your basic nuclear stress, cooking > stress, and A$$hole stress. The key to their relationship is Jello. > > neil > > > > _______________________________________________ > MacOSX-admin mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin > _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
