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Always when I read about SSD usage under Linux, the advice is to disable journalling in Ext4 (or use Ext2), since it's too bad for your SSD. But in all articles about SSD tweaks for Windows, I never see any mentions that you should disable NTFS journalling, or that you should stick to FAT32.

I know Ext4's journaling is more advanced, but is it so much more damaging to a SSD than that of NTFS? Or are Linux users just a little bit more cautious?

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2 Answers

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You can't disable journaling on NTFS.

That being said, the benefits are dubious these days. While writes are limited, the myths of write endurance existed from the first generation of SSDs that appeared in the enterprise market. I find it hard to believe that the same is still true ten years later.

For example, Corsair's blog posted this test.

http://www.corsair.com/blog/force-series-ssd-life-testing/

So one forum member decided to stomp the myth.

The user decided to take three files, copy it a whole bunch, then delete it.

It took 240 TiB of data written to the drive to finally kill it. And mind you, this is on a 40 GB Corsair with a SandForce controller.

The math is easy. If you wrote 20GiB of data a day, it would take you over 30 years to hit that number.

The rest of the blog post gets more detailed and it graphs the SMART data. I'll be glad when the day people stop this one to death. Like the whole "Moon landings were fake" BS. . .

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First phrase is wrong. microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/… – gcb Nov 18 '11 at 0:15
@GCB: This only deletes the journal. There is nothing that prevents the OS from creating a new one. Try it yourself. – surfasb Nov 20 '11 at 13:52
i have no clue on how to use windows systems :) but was curious and found that page... the wording there is "Deleting or disabling an active..." so i assumed it was possible to... but knowing a little about MSDN, i should know better. – gcb Nov 22 '11 at 2:43
When XP first came out, there were a lot of sites harping "speed tips" that included disabling journaling. So I was not surprised. I almost forgot that switch was still there. – surfasb Nov 22 '11 at 5:24
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up vote 1 down vote

The numbers of writes on a SSD until it dies is lower than a regular HD.

So, any time you write to it, it's death comes closer.

you just have to select what is worth writing.

one thing is to disable atime. on any file system. unless you need it. i never needed on my desktop. i can happily live w/out it.

journal, i can disable on SSDs, but never on HDs. Just because the probability of needing it on a HD medium is high enough to justify the resource (drive live and performance) usage

if you need some feature, enable, if not, you are just wasting resources. I disable atime on HDs because of performance...

and keep in mind that newer SSDs live much longer now.

and now finally answering the question :) i think nobody tells you to disable journal on SSDs while using NTFS because nobody knows better. it's extremely easy to find bad advice on windows forums. and the same is happening with ubuntu... so use a grain of salt when using forum for those.

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It's easy to find bad advice on any forum, as the capacity to give bad advice != which OS you use. – surfasb Nov 14 '11 at 7:20
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