• Judicus@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Writing to SSDs wear them out. Most (good) SSDs publish a TBW value on the packaging which is intended to provide guidance on when to replace the drive to avoid data loss (e.g. a 1TB may have a TBW of 600, so you should replace it after about 600TB of data have been written to the disk).

    The constant writing shown in the screenshot must be swap since the available memory is too small for Windows. Swapped data can’t be used directly, so for Windows to make use of it it’ll need to write something else to swap before reading the data it currently needs back from swap, do something with it, then write it to the swap file again before repeating with something else. That churn will happen very quickly on modern systems and drives.

    If you have a swap file on an SSD it isn’t the end of the world. You just need to monitor the disk activity. If it stays high you may not get the longevity out of the drive you’d planned on. In all cases, however, finding a backup solution/system that works for you so that if the disk does die prematurely you don’t lose what’s important is always a good idea.

    • Intralexical@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lmao, I’ve had literally 40-70GB of highly active application swap on an SSD for the last couple months now because I opened stuff and then didn’t close it.

      That said, I chose and installed that drive years ago specifically for this use case (though originally for less intensive/more reasonable cases), and I’m aware of the stupidity of letting it be used like this now.