Hi, after just a couple months after building my computer, I have somehow managed to get a serious virus called "virtumonde" that has pretty much rendered my PC useless half of the time since it makes my whole machine lock-up and it's getting more frequent. I'm thinking that I got it from some gpu/cpu heat monitering software that I downloaded because I received a fake anti-virus directly afterwards. I've tried using malwarebytes, spy bot, and kaspersky full scans and and they don't sense anything. Doing the scans in "safe boot" doesn't help anything either. The only thing I can think of doing at this point is to just format everything via the Windows CD and doing a fresh install. Now my question is will formatting cause any serious damage to my SSD? Just asking because a Microcenter employee basically told me that the SSD would take a rather big hit from the whole process. Also, will formatting through the CD also format my hard drive or do I need to do that separately?
Will formatting my SSD cause damage?
This topic is locked from further discussion.
No, I formatted mines already and still running fine. Though ssd suffers from a certain amount of write cycles (formatting and reinstalling will run it up) and they may slowdown down the road, but I dont think itll affect you anytime soon to the point that your likely to chuck it before it dies. I had this for almost 2 years and the bootup time is relatively the same when I did a clean install.
Just asking because a Microcenter employee basically told me that the SSD would take a rather big hit from the whole process.GrovilisAnd four years ago he would have been right. SSDs have come a long way since then, and any modern SSD controller can handle a full reformat. Which one do you have? (brand and model)
[QUOTE="Grovilis"] Just asking because a Microcenter employee basically told me that the SSD would take a rather big hit from the whole process.ChiliDragonAnd four years ago he would have been right. SSDs have come a long way since then, and any modern SSD controller can handle a full reformat. Which one do you have? (brand and model)OCZ Vertex 3 120GB
^Dont, it does count, which is why you turn defrag off on ssds.
Oh, and will a quick format work or would you suggest that I get some kind of software that will do a deep format?GrovilisJust plug it in as a secondary drive and let Windows format it normally. And a Vertex 3 is stable and solid enough you don't have to worry that much about it. Check for latest firmware and drivers, then plug in, install, and enjoy.
Chili, I'm wondering if a defrag counts against number of rewrites. Seems like it would.topsemag55
Defrag on SSDs is completely useless and does nothing other than lower its lifespan.nedim100What he said. :P Though keep in mind that today's SSDs have a pretty long lifespan to begin with. I have a Crucial M4, and their spec sheet says the read-write cycles (listed as MTBF on the sheet) are good for 1.2 million hours. That's 13,500 years. So yeah, it counts towards the total, but if the total is low enough that defragging noticeably shortens the lifespan, the SSD was flawed in its design to begin with. The main reason you want to avoid a defrag is that after an SSD has mvoed data from a block on the drive, which deletes it, it has to clean out that block and make it writable again before it can use it, and if the firmware's housekeeping/maintenance algorithms aren't properly implemented the drive slows down. Do it too many times and your SSD will eventually become slower than a regular HDD. Same goes for bench marking, though in both cases it takes a lot of punishment before a good SSD starts to suffer. Cheap or old ones are more sensitive.
[QUOTE="Grovilis"] Just plug it in as a secondary drive and let Windows format it normally. And a Vertex 3 is stable and solid enough you don't have to worry that much about it. Check for latest firmware and drivers, then plug in, install, and enjoy. [QUOTE="topsemag55"] Chili, I'm wondering if a defrag counts against number of rewrites. Seems like it would.ChiliDragon
Defrag on SSDs is completely useless and does nothing other than lower its lifespan.nedim100What he said. :P Though keep in mind that today's SSDs have a pretty long lifespan to begin with. I have a Crucial M4, and their spec sheet says the read-write cycles (listed as MTBF on the sheet) are good for 1.2 million hours. That's 13,500 years. So yeah, it counts towards the total, but if the total is low enough that defragging noticeably shortens the lifespan, the SSD was flawed in its design to begin with. The main reason you want to avoid a defrag is that after an SSD has mvoed data from a block on the drive, which deletes it, it has to clean out that block and make it writable again before it can use it, and if the firmware's housekeeping/maintenance algorithms aren't properly implemented the drive slows down. Do it too many times and your SSD will eventually become slower than a regular HDD. Same goes for bench marking, though in both cases it takes a lot of punishment before a good SSD starts to suffer. Cheap or old ones are more sensitive.
Chilli, you really should read the warrenty and specs of the Crusial M4, before saying that... While it IS true that it has 1.2 million hours running time before erros, It only h ave 72 TB rewrite before estimated breakdown.
As We discussed earlier in another topic, the problem with SSds certainly aint the longivity, but the damage they take each time they rewrite.
Now, 72 TB is not bad, (126 Gb models and up) But if used as a pirmary drive to house games, and OS, such things as browsing the web and playing games Does take up some of the fairly precious TBs it can rewrite in its lifetime. An rxample would be a game like crysis 2. which per hour playied averages out in 3,3 GB of rewrites, its not alot. but it averages out at around 20 GB rewrites per day if one plays for around 6 hours per day. Crysis 2 is fairly rewrite heavy mind you, a game like WoW rewrites much less.
However that is only one game, and not including all the other things you might rewrite in a single day outside of gaming IF you use it as a primery HDD,
And the Crusial (the larger unes) have a calculated 40 gb per day in 5 years before they die.
(look up Crucials Homepage, and thier spec PDA for reference).
Last time this was up I compiled a lovely long list of links and quotes to illustrate why SSDs are not the be all and end all for all users (especially the smaller SSds). Sadly GS glitched up and in my frustration I never got around to remake that huge post.
Needless to say, in order to save your SSD as much as possible, I would advise against such things as Defrags, since they rewrite a whole lot, all at once. Pagefiles and indexing, and other unneccecery things I would keep at a minimum or disable aswell.
The ptorblem you could see with an SSD is NOT the number of hours it can run before errors, but rather the number of rewrites it can do before dying.
(Fun fact, if you deal inrelatively heavy computing tasks, or a big/ish stream of data with your computer, an SSD is far better as a storagedevice, Icalculated that I have used up around 64 GB sofar today due to my work). I would kill an SSD faster then you could say *WTF* with my work).
So while an SSD CAN beworthwhile for a user, I would strongly suggest not giving it unneeded wear such as a defrag, and think wisely if you move and gather alot of huge files, through work or other, since it will kill an SSD fast.
Using an SSD as a secondery Drive would fix the defrag problem ofcourse ^^ the main problems would be having the SSD as the primary drive, which weve seen alot of people do, and often complain about. So as a secondery storage media (aka. secondary HDD) you would remove much of the possible wear it could get).
snipMaddie_Larkinthe manufacturers in particular have been super-conservative about the 'life' estimates of their drives - when people have tested (if memory serves, people on XS did it with Intel drives and just 24/7 rewrites except pausing to run TRIM every 24 hours) they were getting up into the petabytes range on drives that were supposed to have 5-10TB life before the flash actually started to die. and of course there are the enterprise drives that are specced for the petabytes range in the first place :D
[QUOTE="Grovilis"]Oh, and will a quick format work or would you suggest that I get some kind of software that will do a deep format?ChiliDragonJust plug it in as a secondary drive and let Windows format it normally. And a Vertex 3 is stable and solid enough you don't have to worry that much about it. Check for latest firmware and drivers, then plug in, install, and enjoy.
Thanks! Much appreciated!
[QUOTE="Maddie_Larkin"]snipMakarithe manufacturers in particular have been super-conservative about the 'life' estimates of their drives - when people have tested (if memory serves, people on XS did it with Intel drives and just 24/7 rewrites except pausing to run TRIM every 24 hours) they were getting up into the petabytes range on drives that were supposed to have 5-10TB life before the flash actually started to die. and of course there are the enterprise drives that are specced for the petabytes range in the first place :D
Indeed ^^ There IS a reason why most major corperations refuse to use much else then an Intel SSD ^^ (And companys like Apple refuse to use SSds not made by Intel) There ARE also SSds made for heavy duty use, which are pretty hard to wear out, but thier pricepoint alone makes one want to sweat blood just by reading the prices :\
The one listed was the Crusial M4, due to the very good average TB rewrite it has ^^
The Samsung 830 is also fairly durable, being able to have something like 40 gb per day in 8 years :s (If I remember correctly) Sadly thier latest driver update bricked the thingby the statement Samsung made:S
The amount of broken, or worn out drives doesspeak volumes tho.It is not that an SSD is NOT usable, just that there are very few, that are made to replace the average mechanical main drive of a PC, without taking time and understand just how different they are.
basicly ther IS a reason why they have the estimated in those numbers, since putting down higher numbers would undoubtly give more sales, so there is a real consistancy issue here.
We often see the 1.2 mill hours use beforeerror getting thrown around, but man does that give a very wrong image XD
Chilli, you really should read the warrenty and specs of the Crusial M4, before saying that... While it IS true that it has 1.2 million hours running time before erros, It only h ave 72 TB rewrite before estimated breakdown.Maddie_LarkinNo, what I should have done is to not whip up a reply when I'm half-way out the door on my way to work. :P Then I would have taken the time to use a specification that makes sense, can be measured, and can be used together with your own usage data to make actually useful calculations. But since I was in a hurry I took a shortcut to a big number that looks good, is easy to understand, and can be used to easily over-simplify the main point (and I over-simplify too much, thanks to spending every day doing it at work and building bad habits), which is that by the time the vast most of the owners of client drives manage to wear out their SSD, they've probably already bought a new computer. [QUOTE="Maddie_Larkin"]Needless to say, in order to save your SSD as much as possible, I would advise against such things as Defrags, since they rewrite a whole lot, all at once. Pagefiles and indexing, and other unneccecery things I would keep at a minimum or disable as well. The problem you could see with an SSD is NOT the number of hours it can run before errors, but rather the number of rewrites it can do before dying. (Fun fact, if you deal inrelatively heavy computing tasks, or a big/ish stream of data with your computer, an SSD is far better as a storage device, I calculated that I have used up around 64 GB sofar today due to my work). I would kill an SSD faster then you could say *WTF* with my work). So while an SSD CAN beworthwhile for a user, I would strongly suggest not giving it unneeded wear such as a defrag, and think wisely if you move and gather alot of huge files, through work or other, since it will kill an SSD fast. And this is why I said "most owners" and not "all owners". At least twice a day at work I tell customers that there's no such thing as an objective standard for what is "the best thing" when it comes to which hardware to buy and how to configure it. What is "best" is whatever best fits your particular situation, and that varies from person to person. I've seen people use up the full amount of SSD write cycles in less than two months, because they set up the SSD to use full hard drive encryption and then wrote large files to it every day. Or they weren't even able to boot it because they installed it in a server that refuses to boot a drive that doesn't have a temperature sensor. SSDs are not the second coming of Computer Christ even in an ideal world, and how good an idea they are depends entirely on the environment they're going to end up in and how they are used. Like every other computer part, they run better and for longer if they are tweaked and fine-tuned than if you install them and leave them alone, and it's in anyone's best interest to research the technology and gain a better understanding of how it operates before buying one. And just like any other computer technology it's up to each individual to consider their needs and circumstances and then decide what is the best fit for their needs. For me, in a computer used mainly for internet, emails, and gaming, the SSD made it noticeably faster without me needing to anything other than install and configure it. I update the firmware when new versions come out, check the SMART info occasionally to make sure it's still okay, and my only complaint is that it is too small. The way you describe your computer usage, having an SSD the way I do, would kill it in record time. While for me, using the SSD the way you do would be a waste of an SSD since I wouldn't actually see any noticeable speed benefits from it since I hardly ever access my secondary storage drive. To each their own, that way we both get what we need and want. :)
[QUOTE="Maddie_Larkin"]Chilli, you really should read the warrenty and specs of the Crusial M4, before saying that... While it IS true that it has 1.2 million hours running time before erros, It only h ave 72 TB rewrite before estimated breakdown.ChiliDragonNo, what I should have done is to not whip up a reply when I'm half-way out the door on my way to work. :P Then I would have taken the time to use a specification that makes sense, can be measured, and can be used together with your own usage data to make actually useful calculations. But since I was in a hurry I took a shortcut to a big number that looks good, is easy to understand, and can be used to easily over-simplify the main point (and I over-simplify too much, thanks to spending every day doing it at work and building bad habits), which is that by the time the vast most of the owners of client drives manage to wear out their SSD, they've probably already bought a new computer.
Needless to say, in order to save your SSD as much as possible, I would advise against such things as Defrags, since they rewrite a whole lot, all at once. Pagefiles and indexing, and other unneccecery things I would keep at a minimum or disable as well. The problem you could see with an SSD is NOT the number of hours it can run before errors, but rather the number of rewrites it can do before dying. (Fun fact, if you deal inrelatively heavy computing tasks, or a big/ish stream of data with your computer, an SSD is far better as a storage device, I calculated that I have used up around 64 GB sofar today due to my work). I would kill an SSD faster then you could say *WTF* with my work). So while an SSD CAN beworthwhile for a user, I would strongly suggest not giving it unneeded wear such as a defrag, and think wisely if you move and gather alot of huge files, through work or other, since it will kill an SSD fast.Maddie_LarkinAnd this is why I said "most owners" and not "all owners". At least twice a day at work I tell customers that there's no such thing as an objective standard for what is "the best thing" when it comes to which hardware to buy and how to configure it. What is "best" is whatever best fits your particular situation, and that varies from person to person. I've seen people use up the full amount of SSD write cycles in less than two months, because they set up the SSD to use full hard drive encryption and then wrote large files to it every day. Or they weren't even able to boot it because they installed it in a server that refuses to boot a drive that doesn't have a temperature sensor. SSDs are not the second coming of Computer Christ even in an ideal world, and how good an idea they are depends entirely on the environment they're going to end up in and how they are used. Like every other computer part, they run better and for longer if they are tweaked and fine-tuned than if you install them and leave them alone, and it's in anyone's best interest to research the technology and gain a better understanding of how it operates before buying one. And just like any other computer technology it's up to each individual to consider their needs and circumstances and then decide what is the best fit for their needs. For me, in a computer used mainly for internet, emails, and gaming, the SSD made it noticeably faster without me needing to anything other than install and configure it. I update the firmware when new versions come out, check the SMART info occasionally to make sure it's still okay, and my only complaint is that it is too small. The way you describe your computer usage, having an SSD the way I do, would kill it in record time. While for me, using the SSD the way you do would be a waste of an SSD since I wouldn't actually see any noticeable speed benefits from it since I hardly ever access my secondary storage drive. To each their own, that way we both get what we need and want. :)
Oh don't get me wrong Chilli :) I ain't saying that an SSD is useless, But we have seen alot of people getting advised on an SSD without much explanation on how they work, and thus thinks they work like a very fast errorless Mechanical ^^
I can see alot of really good reasons to have an SSD ^^ They DO require some maintenance and knowhow, but when that is said, if you know how to maintain an SSD, then it IS a very good tool to have ^^
It is just somewhat bitter to see people go out to buy a 512 gig SSD, with the thought of replacing thier Primary HDD with an SSD, and not making the needed tweaks. Tends to be a very expensive mistake to make. In the other thread I commented on a few friends who did that (now 4 *sigh*)
Me? I prefer to use them for storage for information storage on servers (they are really great for that, if they need little rewrites they are a godsent).
Even if you have one and know how to take care of it and maintain it, it IS a pretty good option to haveand use as a standard HDD:) you just need to disable a few things in Windows, and read up on a few things about each make, a few of those thingstends to be very hard to read ,since it is not openly written on the boxes,which basicly is my main concern for SSDs, I often feel that consumers get too little information about them.
Oh and I have a pet peeve with automatic garbage collection (Im one of those who prefer active garbage collection) due to the possible slowtime you can see if you are unlucky. (but that really is a personal thing)
I've heared SSD lifespan should be higher than mechanical HDD even with the rewrite restriction.
I'm going to theorycraft and pretend someone buys a SSD simply to install and uninstall Shogun 2 constantly (which is about 20 gig install)
72TB = 72.000GB
72.000 GB / 20gb = 3600 (so someone can install Shogun2 3600 times onto a SSD from a DVD drive before it will apparently wear out)
It takes roughly 30 mins to install Shogun2.
3600 X 30 =108.000
108.000 / 60 = 1800 hours
1800 hours / 24 = 75 days.So it would take 75 days of constant use of installing and uninstalling Shogun2 onto a SSD from a DVD drive to consume its 72TB lifespan.
All theorycraft b.s of course but it's just a example of how large a 72tb lifespan truly is.
I've heared SSD lifespan should be higher than mechanical HDD even with the rewrite restriction.
I'm going to theorycraft and pretend someone buys a SSD simply to install and uninstall Shogun 2 constantly (which is about 20 gig install)
72TB = 72.000GB
72.000 GB / 20gb = 3600 (so someone can install Shogun2 3600 times onto a SSD from a DVD drive before it will apparently wear out)
It takes roughly 30 mins to install Shogun2.
3600 X 30 =108.000
108.000 / 60 = 1800 hours
1800 hours / 24 = 75 days.So it would take 75 days of constant use of installing and uninstalling Shogun2 onto a SSD from a DVD drive to consume its 72TB lifespan.
All theorycraft b.s of course but it's just a example of how large a 72tb lifespan truly is.
ShimmerMan
You unfortanatly left out that rewrites occurs alot more often then when you install something, using the web, playing games, and so on takes ALOT more then installs. Tomshardware uses Crysis 2 as an example, (also WoW) both are really good examples of how much games read and write, when loading a game or area, it is strictly loading, but a map is mostly writing.
40 GB of rewrites is pretty average for a typical Bootdrive through a single day.
The hours between errors, and amount of times you can rewrite has very little to do with eachother, one of them, id the durability as is, before errors, the other is the durability of the ability to rewrite the cells. Sadly if a cell goes, it will be a domino effekt.
The Crucial M4 is a pretty good test disk to use for reference, since it has the median in statistics, (and lives up to what they write). And has an Estimated lifespan of5 years with 40GB use per day.Any heavy workload items such as images,video, audio, or 3d modelling, will use exponentially more.
Edit: The above post pretty much illustrates my point somewhat, Alot of things about SSDs are not written or explained clearly enough for consumers.
It really ain't a problem with the SSDs themselves, but the information the manufactors make public, Ive seen some SSD disks that does not evenlist the estimated TB before cell collapsein the instruction booklets or on the package. Hiding something that important is pretty darn bad.
Simply put alot of people make an SSD out to work just as a mechanical HDD, and they do not,Ive even seen a great deal of PC builders that makes the mistakes the averageconsumers tend to do, which tells me that the lack of basic information and understanding stretches all the way up there, which issomewhat frightening when the socalledExperts that people trust, themselves often don't understandhow an SSD works.
From real life testing it seems the majority of these SSDs are stronger than advertised (as seen on Xtremesystems.org). On the internet there are results from torture tests and the M4 drives lasted over 500tb worth of writing. That must be hundreds of GBs worth of usage everyday over a five year life span. Seems the likely hoods are consumers will be replacing the drives for quicker drives long before the drives wear out.
Simply put alot of people make an SSD out to work just as a mechanical HDD, and they do not,Ive even seen a great deal of PC builders that makes the mistakes the averageconsumers tend to do, which tells me that the lack of basic information and understanding stretches all the way up there, which is somewhat frightening when the so called Experts that people trust, themselves often don't understandhow an SSD works. Maddie_LarkinIt doesn't make it any easier that a lot of the information available online is either inaccurate or outdated. Computer hardware changes all the time, and SSDs are still so nwe that the technology is still evolving as it's being devloped and tested. An article that was accurate 12 months ago often no longer apply. And I agree, most, if not all, misunderstandings or misconceptions about SSDs come from the assumption that they work like HDDs do, which is utterly wrong. But since they look the same, and since they are storage, it's an easy mistake to make.
Please Log In to post.
Log in to comment