Random Rants ΠΓ': Parental guidance required

[hobbsyoyo]

The one thing that worries me when I finally get an SSD is how my game install habits will affect it. I usually only have the games I am actively playing or about to play installed. Everything else gets uninstalled real lickity split. Since SSDs having limited writes, I figure it'd be, eh, detrimental to be installing and uninstalling dozens of games each year.

Easiest solution would be to only have the heavy duty games on the SSD, but I'd still run into the same issue, just with a smaller number.

You can format SSD's so that they wear-level when it comes to how files are rewritten to lengthen their life. I also feel like their lifetimes are measured in thousands or tens of thousands of cycles so I doubt you'd be making a meaningful dent in that with game installation/removal but idk

 

[cardgame]

The one thing that worries me when I finally get an SSD is how my game install habits will affect it. I usually only have the games I am actively playing or about to play installed. Everything else gets uninstalled real lickity split. Since SSDs having limited writes, I figure it'd be, eh, detrimental to be installing and uninstalling dozens of games each year.

Easiest solution would be to only have the heavy duty games on the SSD, but I'd still run into the same issue, just with a smaller number.

Not an issue my dude, you'd need to be writing like 100gb per day every day every single day nonstop for like 5 years before you have any issues. My main drive is a 500gb SSD and it has like 65tb total written after 4 years, it's good until I dunno, 250-500 tbw

 

[Synobun]

Not an issue my dude, you'd need to be writing like 100gb per day every day every single day nonstop for like 5 years before you have any issues. My main drive is a 500gb SSD and it has like 65tb total written after 4 years, it's good until I dunno, 250-500 tbw

Hmm.

That's pretty good. I was thinking about how many TBs I've gone through, and the largest percentage is undoubtedly shows and movies. I'll just need a separate HDD for those. If I had to guess, my game installs/uninstalls probably amount to no more than 30 TB in the lifetime of this laptop (~5 years). I haven't played any of the monstrously sized games, though—the ones that are near 100 GB by themselves. Still, even if I did it with reckless abandon, it seems I wouldn't have any issues with lifespan. I don't think I've had an HDD last more than 7 years anyways.

This is reassuring!

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Rant: I woke up to a freezing house.

 

[The_J]

I recommend a blanket for the house, and it might maybe want a hot chocolate too ^^.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

It was freezing because my mother randomly decided to open all the windows and balcony door. I don't know why.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The one thing that worries me when I finally get an SSD is how my game install habits will affect it. I usually only have the games I am actively playing or about to play installed. Everything else gets uninstalled real lickity split. Since SSDs having limited writes, I figure it'd be, eh, detrimental to be installing and uninstalling dozens of games each year.

Easiest solution would be to only have the heavy duty games on the SSD, but I'd still run into the same issue, just with a smaller number.

Don't worry about it, honestly. SSDs don't run out of writes near that fast.

That said, games with lots of loading/textures popping up benefit from SSDs most.

Oh, and don't ever defrag an SSD. It's useless and just makes it wear out faster.

 

[Synobun]

Don't worry about it, honestly. SSDs don't run out of writes near that fast.

That said, games with lots of loading/textures popping up benefit from SSDs most.

Oh, and don't ever defrag an SSD. It's useless and just makes it wear out faster.

IIRC, Windows 10 automagically disables defrag when it detects an SSD.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

It does. You can use TRIM instead, which lets the SSD wipe empty sectors.

 

[JohannaK]

I like to think I keep only "active" games installed, but I can go months or years not playing some of those, so take it as you will.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Internet in Nova Scotia isn't always great so I prefer to keep games installed unless I know I won't be playing them for a while. I do swap them back and forth between my SSD and HDD though because of space limitations.

 

[MaryKB]

Oh dear, should I be uninstalling games?

How do I defrag my computer in Windows 10? What does defragging do, exactly?

 

[Synobun]

Windows 10 does it automatically. Unless you disable it.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

When your hard drive writes files, they sometimes get broken up into chunks and end up in different parts of the disk, which means the HDD has to search around when you open them.

Windows 10 should automatically handle it so don't worry about it.

Oh dear, should I be uninstalling games?

Not unless you're running out of hard disk space. But some people prefer to for various reasons.

 

[AdamCrock]

Oh dear, should I be uninstalling games?

How do I defrag my computer in Windows 10? What does defragging do, exactly?

Imagine Your disk as the wardrobe. "Clothes" are written files and empty space is well... empty space . Defragging is like sorting the wardrobe, so all Your clothes (files) are sorted out neatly on one side and all Your free space is left on the other side, clothes are also left with no "in between" gaps. Defragging makes Your disk find and access the clothes err... the files more quickly

 

[Truthy]

You can format SSD's so that they wear-level when it comes to how files are rewritten to lengthen their life. I also feel like their lifetimes are measured in thousands or tens of thousands of cycles so I doubt you'd be making a meaningful dent in that with game installation/removal but idk

Wear-leveling is actually just a thing your SSD almost definitely does on its own as it gets write requests from the OS/driver. You don't have to enable it yourself or anything like that. But yeah, it does prolong the SSD lifespan by keeping writes distributed roughly uniformly across the device's memory blocks. And yeah also game installation wouldn't matter much. That's likely pretty marginal.

The wear-levelling thing also ties into the defragmentation discussion @aimeeandbeatles and friends are having. You can't really even defragment an SSD at all, in the sense of literally rewriting all your files to be contiguous blocks on your storage device (like with an HDD). The firmware/device controller, will just disperse the rewrites around the physical address space. And it mostly doesn't matter at all for an SSD anyway since seek times aren't a thing (it matters slightly for reducing metadata).

When Windows's Disk Optimizer (I think it's called) utility runs on an SSD, it's mainly just sending trim requests to the SSD. Those queue up and the SSD will internally mark that those physical blocks can be wiped or overwritten. But by my reading (it's late, could be wrong) aimee suggested that you, the user, should (or have to) do this yourself. You don't need to do this yourself and I don't think there are many reasons why you'd need to. Windows does it fairly regularly with the aforementioned utility, unless you disable it (which you probably shouldn't).

 

[MaryKB]

One of my cats pooped on the floor, and my robot spread it all over the carpet.

 

[AdamCrock]

One of my cats pooped on the floor, and my robot spread it all over the carpet.

Oh crap ! You have my sympathy

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Dude brutal media morning.

Spoiler really sad stuff :

Woke up and one of the first things I saw on reddit was pictures of a 14 year old boy crying as they strapped the electric chair electrode to his head before he was wrongly executed. The local news followed that up with a story about a mountain lion eating a family's dog right in front of them (mini schnauzer charged the lion to be fair) and another about an LAPD officer that has been caught on his own body cam groping a dead body.

 

[MaryKB]

Woke up and one of the first things I saw on reddit was pictures of a 14 year old boy crying as they strapped the electric chair electrode to his head before he was wrongly executed.

I wish you hadn't said anything about this, this is incredibly disturbing