I want it to last as long as I keep this computer . . .which given laptop lifetimes and the need to upgrade every 3 years or so means about 2 more years probably. Given that . . .it's a question of whether noatime will prevent SSD write life from being used up. When you average the number of writes over the whole 240 GB on the drive . . .then you end up with really long times to failure. OTOH, if you're constantly rewriting the same blocks due to modifying the directory entries for access time, etc . . .then conceivably it's a much shorter time since the writes aren't averaged over the whole drive but just a small subset of blocks.
In my research . .I've seen statements that drive writes are randomized and that the directory blocks are constantly moved around on the SSD by the wear leveling routines in the drive firmware . . .but then there were the counter claims that only data blocks were randomized through wear leveling and not the directory blocks. I was unable to find any definitive statement on it. My gut feeling is that you're right and the life shortening by not using noatime is minimal . . .but was looking for some sort of definitive statement. On Mar 11, 2011, at 11:43 AM, Daniel Hazelbaker wrote: > 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): ----------------------------------------------- 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
