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My PC had an auxiliary issue which caused the hard drive light to stay on. While investigating this (seems to be related to a HDD which likes to drop off the bus at random times) I noticed my SSD encounters frequent albeit small write activity.

After a lot of digging around, I finally noticed in Resource Monitor that Windows 7 seems to constantly be generating a lot log files on the C drive. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised of course, but it got me thinking - should I reconfigure these logfiles to write onto a different (non SSD) drive? Will it make a sizeable impact on the SSD lifetime & performance (Intel 510, by the way)?

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  • Part of the strange behavior that I forgot to mention is the write activity seems a lot larger than log files, in the range of 5-20 MB every few seconds or so... but not all the time, just for long stretches. I was wondering, could this be some "invisible" TRIM (or similar) activity generating erroneous numbers?
    – Malachi
    Jun 28, 2011 at 21:49
  • TRIM commands are only sent when files are marked for deletion, and would not cause this (they are sent by the low-level filesystem drivers). That being said, I would be quite concerned with this write activity (I just made the switch to an SSD as well), since who wouldn't want their SSD to last longer. Jun 29, 2011 at 2:14

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I would definitely move logging on to magnetic media, or at least not your SSD.

One reason is indeed that Flash memory has a limited number of read/write cycles. Though I believe the Intel SSDs are understood to be of the better SSD drives.

I think you may also get a performance benefit from moving frequently logged junk on to another drive. Ideally something that's fast, but at least if it's something else, that could help. I'd also enable write caching for that drive/partition, so some disk io is buffered a bit more.

Hard drives are so cheap now too. As much as you appear to have a good SSD, it's a much much younger tech, so I'd treat it with a little more caution anyway.

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  • In general I wouldn't be so quick to move logs because it can slow down whatever it is logging.
    – JamesRyan
    Jun 29, 2011 at 3:05

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