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System Restore and SSDs

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System Restore and SSDs

Postby Dave McElderry » Sat Jul 23, 2016 8:53 am

I was wondering what those with Solid State Drives think about the use of System Restore. I've always thought of the Windows System Restore functions as being almost critical to have active in case of a difficult problem - roll the system back to a point where it was working well and the problem is often solved. However, there seem to be several schools of thought when it comes to using System Restore with SSDs. One says that it can significantly shorten the lifespan of the drive due to the large number of writes. Another says that it won't harm the drive, but can affect system performance by creating a large amount of background processes (wouldn't it have done the same with HDDs?). And finally there are those who say that it's not a big deal and they wouldn't be without System Restore, whether using a traditional HDD or an SSD. I've been reading and reading and am more confused than ever. What do you folks who use SSDs do?
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Steve Grisetti » Sat Jul 23, 2016 9:22 am

I'll be interested to hear what the experts have to say, Dave. I thought the whole point of an SSD (aside from its speed) is that it had no moving parts and thus had a much, much longer lifespan than a traditional drive.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Chris B » Sat Jul 23, 2016 9:59 am

Flash wears out - better (more expensive) flash wears out slower. I've got a Samsung 850 Evo 250GB drive. Samsung give a warranty on the drive of 5 years or 75TB written.. By comparison the Intel DC S3170 200GB has an endurance of 3.6PB. The Intel drive costs around 3 times as much.

I got this drive in January 2015. It has been my main OS drive with Swap file, system restore and windows 10 upgrade applied to it (and now hibernate file). Samsung provide a tool that shows the total GB written. So far I've written 17.3TB to the drive which works out as just under 26GB/day. At this rate I've got 6.4 years of lifespan left in the drive (which would be a total of around 8 years lifespan). In other words - There's no real issue here as by then I would expect another technology to have taken it's place (xpoint or similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint - Expect drives later this year)
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Dave McElderry » Sat Jul 23, 2016 10:16 am

Chris B wrote:Flash wears out - better (more expensive) flash wears out slower. I've got a Samsung 850 Evo 250GB drive. Samsung give a warranty on the drive of 5 years or 75TB written.. By comparison the Intel DC S3170 200GB has an endurance of 3.6PB. The Intel drive costs around 3 times as much.

I got this drive in January 2015. It has been my main OS drive with Swap file, system restore and windows 10 upgrade applied to it (and now hibernate file). Samsung provide a tool that shows the total GB written. So far I've written 17.3TB to the drive which works out as just under 26GB/day. At this rate I've got 6.4 years of lifespan left in the drive (which would be a total of around 8 years lifespan). In other words - There's no real issue here as by then I would expect another technology to have taken it's place (xpoint or similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint - Expect drives later this year)

That's especially interesting Chris. Samsung recommends not using hibernate because of all the data that's written each time the system goes into hibernate. I think it will be interesting over time to see how many GB written I average per day. I think I'm with you when it comes to accepting that there are acceptable lifespan numbers, and the convenience and safety of certain OS functions are worth giving up some of that lifespan. If it turned an expected lifespan of 7 years into 2 years, then no. But if it turned an expected lifespan of 7 years into 6 years, then probably worth it.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Chris B » Sat Jul 23, 2016 1:22 pm

Like I said - the warranty is 5 years in any case. If I chewed through the data before 5 years I'd be pretty miffed. I tend to think that warranty is the period that Samsung think the product will defiantly last - It will probably do much more.

These guys deliberately killed some (older) drives - they worst performer got to the 200 TB mark before the first sector re-allocation and then went on to 800TB of writes. At my rate 200TB is 21 years.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Dave McElderry » Sat Jul 23, 2016 2:09 pm

That's some test! I came close to buying the 850 Evo and then at the last minute sprang for the 850 Pro because it had a 10 years or 300 TBW warranty in my 512GB model (up from 10 years or 150 TBW in the comparable 850 Evo 500GB model). For the extra money I thought it was worth the peace of mind. However, after reading that article I'm beginning to think that for the kind of use that mine will see it may have been overkill. One thing that's obvious is that these units are getting to be a lot tougher than I was giving them credit for. One statement in the article was a bit disconcerting though:
Samsung's own software pronounced the 840 Series and 840 Pro to be in good health before their respective deaths. Worryingly, the 840 Series' uncorrectable errors didn't change that cheery assessment.

The 850s are a different technology than the 840s anyway, so maybe that doesn't even apply. Chances are that I'll never reach that point anyway. Wouldn't it be great if someday I threw the drive away without a failure because it had become outdated and slow compared to the newer technologies? It will be interesting to see how it fares. Now, what to do with that Samsung 1TB HDD that it replaced? :-k
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby John 'twosheds' McDonald » Sat Jul 23, 2016 2:33 pm

IMHO. Regardless of the technology, storage devices will fail. It is imperative to have a realistic backup regime.

My SanDisk system drive SSD has a ten year warranty but I still back it up on a daily basis to my NAS. Until I replace it my other internal drive "work area drive" is a WD Raptor and that too is backed up daily to the NAS. Everything that I work on is carried out on my desktop PC with the daily backups to the NAS so the maximum risk of data loss is one days worth of work. For video projects I use the autosave facility in PPro with autosaves every half hour.

Everything held on my NAS, which is configured in RAID10 so I can lose one HDD without data loss, is backed up but on a weekly basis. So I am reasonably content that my risk of data loss is minimal.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Dave McElderry » Sat Jul 23, 2016 2:43 pm

I agree John. I backup with Carbonite online, plus one of my internal 1TB HDDs is dedicated just to backups.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby George Tyndall » Sun Jul 24, 2016 5:02 pm

Dave McElderry wrote:I was wondering ....


Check out the following video, Dave.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Oogz7ArMw70?autoplay=1

Then click the following link for a comparison of the FREE v. the PAID versions

http://www.horizondatasys.com/en/products_and_solutions.aspx?ProductId=40#Benefits

Note that, assuming your SSD qualifies as a physical drive--and I'm not sure that it does--you would need the PAID version.

I've been using the program with a HDD for many years, and it has never failed me, including this am, when I got a blue screen after booting with two new 3TB external HDDs that I had used all day yesterday.

BTW, Rollback-RX allegedly uses only a tiny fraction of the real estate that is consumed by System Restore.

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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Dave McElderry » Sun Jul 24, 2016 5:57 pm

Thanks George. I'll check it out.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby sidd finch » Mon Jul 25, 2016 10:27 am

This is some interesting opinions on SSD and system restore. I had no idea that was even an issue. I do know you are not supposed to defrag SSD's but I am happy to see more infor on the subject. I am thinking of slowly converting over to SSD for storage but that will take some time.

I have been reading about the 2D vs 3D storage method that the SSD uses and it seems that while the 3D is the more advanced method the 2D is more stable.

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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Dave McElderry » Mon Jul 25, 2016 10:56 am

sidd finch wrote:This is some interesting opinions on SSD and system restore. I had no idea that was even an issue. I do know you are not supposed to defrag SSD's but I am happy to see more infor on the subject.

That's another topic of interest. Since Win 7 defrag has been an automatic background process and it's the same in Win 10. I've read that the OS knows that it's working on an SSD and doesn't defrag. However, it's not quite so simple as that. There are still some defrag-type operations that take place, but what I've read is way above me. Since it's out of my hands I just have to trust that it's not doing damage to the SSD.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby sidd finch » Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:08 am

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." ..... Ferris Bueller
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby Dave McElderry » Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:31 am

sidd finch wrote:An interesting read on SSD defrag

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAn ... urSSD.aspx

That's actually one of the articles that led me to the statement that I made above. If you follow the blog link and read the discussion it becomes obvious that even the "experts" are in disagreement on the topic. Some of this is becoming dated, too, so I have to wonder if Windows hasn't become smarter about it over time.
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Re: System Restore and SSDs

Postby sidd finch » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:36 pm

A little more info on the 2D vs 3D SSD:

2D Planar NAND and 3D Vertical NAND – The Difference

Instead of using the conductive floating gate (like all the other flash memory chips) to store charge, the 3D V-NAND Technology uses Silicon Nitride (an insulator) to store charge by means of the Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology. This little modification means that there is no memory wear (or) flash wear caused due to short circuit currents.

But the operation of a control gate MOSFET can explained practically considering a bucket of water. The water stays in the bucket until there isn’t any hole in the bucket. Once there is a hole, sooner or later the entire bucket is gets emptied. Here water is analogy to the charge present on the floating gate and the bucket that holds this water is analogous to the layer of insulating material around the floating gate.

This hole formation in the insulating oxide layer is the resultant of the stress caused on this layer while writing into the drive. Due to which over a span of time the degradation is multiplied and ultimately the floating gate gets short-circuited. Manufacturers, in order to avoid such floating gate collapses, usually thicken this insulating layer thus increasing the ‘endurance’, hence the life time of a typical 2D Planar NAND SSDs.

But a Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology, in 3D Vertical NAND is immune to such memory wear outs and a short circuit will result in no severe effects. This is primarily because the charge is stored on an insulator and no short-circuit would disturb this charge. Hence there is no need to employ a thick oxide layer and the capacitance effect can be kept to minimum levels, thus, improving the speed of the write and read operations and the interference with neighboring cells isn’t much of a problem.

It is due to this vital aspect that a charge trapping cell can be stacked over another such cell and this is why 24 layer 3D V-NAND and a 32 layer 3D V-NAND were a reality.

The Plus Points:

The vertical stacking of cells is more advantageous than the planar arrangement. With vertical stacking, a higher capacity of cells can be included in a given volume. This improves the electrical efficiency as the connections are shortened hence much lower power is consumed. Thanks to the charge trap flash technology due to which Samsung has openly announced a warranty period of 10 years on the SSD 850 PRO and that’s how confident they are about the endurance of the 3D V-NAND. Hence the Samsung 850 PRO SSD will surely turn out to be a revolutionary storage device once it is set into the market.

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