SSD Use During YouTube or Streaming

ZeeOSix

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How much SSD use is there when watching YouTube ... or for that matter streaming anything on-line? Since SSDs have a finite life, wondering if watching a lot of YouTube or doing a lot of on-line streaming would be cutting down SSD life.
 
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I doubt it's significant, I do tons of web browsing and youtube watching on this machine, I used it in my primary laptop for 2 years, then bought a new laptop, and used the 256g drive in it for a a while, then moved it to my new laptop when I wanted more space, so about 4 years in my laptops I use for hours a day that I've probably watched thousands of hours of YouTube videos on it, in addition to the stuff I do that's probably wasted several TBW. On a regular machine by the time the amount written matters the machine will be beyond outdated.
 
wouldnt worry about it. the number is big.

its like saying "Should I walk" I only have a tanker truck of gas.

To give you an idea I had a samsung 950 and its at 99% after 6 years.
tires have a finite life maybe I shouldnt go grocery shopping.
 
i believe streaming and video caching is done on ram. I just checked my tbw and its at 10.2tbw and ive owned this laptop for around 27 months and its my daily machine. its got a 512gb wd blue and its tbw is 300 if I'm not mistaken so I'm more than good.

Have the battery set to stop at 55% and its plugged in indefinitely with a mouse as well but i take it with me occasionally.
 
All this talk about SSD lifecycles...has anyone had one fail?
If they did it wasn't flash nand wear related. They usually fail from something else like a controller or other component but as long as it's a good brand like Samsung, crucial, or western digital who have in house controllers and nand id sleep well at night.

If it's a brand that buys varying grades of components from varying vendors with varying combinations components no thanks.
 
I should have prefaced that with a quality brand.

In my cheapness, I once bought an off brand SSD and my computer wouldn't even recognize it. Sent it back and now just buy Sandisk.
 
How much SSD use is there when watching YouTube ... or for that matter streaming anything on-line? Since SSDs have a finite life, wondering if watching a lot of YouTube or doing a lot of on-line streaming would be cutting down SSD life.
You're never going to reach the end of life of whatever SSD you have if you bought it in the last 10 years. It's not worth thinking about.

That doesn't mean it won't fail for any number of reasons. SSD's certainly do go bad just like any other PC component, but you won't wear it out.
 
Streaming video only caches it in memory so there is zero difference in SSD use over doing something else instead.

I wouldn't go as far as some suggest, that you won't wear your SSD out in 10 years. If you bought an MLC drive 10 years ago maybe, but if you buy a QLC today? Not so much, they can't take an order of magnitude fewer write cycles. One of my 6 year old MLC drives is down to 77% health (in HDSentinel). This # has been slowly dropping over the past few years, not some new sudden failure mode.

Maybe the 77% figure is misleading, but I suspect I'd have nearly worn out a QLC drive in same amount of time or less. Granted this is in a system used for work, and always running 24/7, and QLC drives are a more recent development, you're more likely to get a TLC unless a very high capacity model.
 
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You two scenarios shouldn't affect your SSD although on a computer, the OS could write data from RAM to the SSD. Will it ? I really don't know... Remember that streaming devices, ChromeOS machines, etc don't have hard drives.
 
I never had any survive my business machines. I swore them off.
Of course sending them unprotected in a bubble mailer didn't help courtesy of Amazon.
SSD's don't need shock protection, that's one of the big plusses of using them in a laptop. Being shipped in a bubble mailer shouldn't cause any issues at all.
 
Yes, plenty of them in M.2 at work and one crappy old 2.5" Mushkin at home, but never because they wore out. That's been a non-issue for years now.
Yup, I have:
1x dead Sandisk (SATA)
2x dead NVMe ones, both OEM, one from an HP Elitebook, another from a DELL. The HP one was Hynix (I have it on my desk here), don't recall the brand of the other. None of these were very old.
 
There's a bug in some older HPE servers that wear out a speciality board's storage memory. As a lot of them failed they made a patch to change the wear leveling algorithm. In the last two years they've gotten pissy about applying all recommended updates before opening a support case.

I had a SATA SSD stop dead after it hit a certain number of run hours. A patch brought it back to life. It was known to just stop at that number of hours.

For the most part the people who made sucky controllers went out of business. The hobby enthusiasts were very vocal; the enterprise was very slow to adopt so benefitted by staying out of the market for awhile.
 
SSD's don't need shock protection, that's one of the big plusses of using them in a laptop. Being shipped in a bubble mailer shouldn't cause any issues at all.
Might cause ESDS issues depending on packing material.
 
My MacBook is almost exclusively a YouTube machine now…. In 82 hours of uptime, it’s written 13.82Gb to the disk of which ~750Mb is from Safari.
 
SSD's don't need shock protection, that's one of the big plusses of using them in a laptop. Being shipped in a bubble mailer shouldn't cause any issues at all.
In general, how much torture a given
SSD drive can take varies according to the nature of its enclosure. Some will let you drive a car over them. Others might be designed to handle just a short fall off a desk, and not much more
 
All this talk about SSD lifecycles...has anyone had one fail?
I had a 250GB SSD fail in a 2012 Macbook pro after about a year earlier this year. The macbook got extremely slow, and would take like 4 minutes to boot, and 30 secs to open the browser, while i did not lose ANY information, i now make sure i back up often.
 
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