hello everyone, as SSDs are constantly read and written, their lifespan can be shorter, even if they are NVMe SSD. Do you think it would be healthier to use a large game engine like Unity with an HDD?
Writes affect endurance but reads don’t, and even then it’s an absurd lifespan. A budget drive like the Intel 660p has a write endurance rating of 100TB for every 512GB (ie a 1TB drive is 200TB). To exhaust that you’d have to write 256GB per 100TB a day for an entire year.
My computer has three XPG GAMMIX S11 Pro 2TB drives. The most heavily written drive which is also the drive for my work projects has seen 66TB of activity out of a maximum of 1,280TB. It is 2 years 68 days old. At that rate it will take over 40 years to exhaust it.
In 40 years not only will it likely be too small to be practical but the slot that it fits into likely won’t even exist.
Are you prepared for every action you perform inside and outside of Unity to take anywhere from 10x to 1,000x as long to perform? I’ve timed Visual Studio on an HDD and a SATA SSD. On the SSD it took several seconds to load but on an HDD I’ve seen it take a few minutes.
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I use another brand, the durability rate is “500GB for 200 TB”. I started using Unity and in the utility application of the SSD, the health decreased by 3% quickly. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Unity, of course.
But if everyone uses it this way, there is no problem. Someone suggested HDD, but I don’t know on what basis he said this. I will continue to use it this way.
I know, I was using it with HDD before, I would open the programs, go to the balcony, have a coffee and come back… and I was waiting a while longer.
Compared to working on a SSD your mental health will DEFINITELY take a serious beating when working off a HDD. 
And if I’m not mistaken that’s “mean time between failure” so that’ll be when the first non-recoverable failure occurs (rather: is expected to occur on average) and that means the SSD firmware will flag this part as defective and you lose a little storage capacity, and only if you’re unlucky that happened to affect a very important file.
Overall, the bigger the SSD the longer its lifespan since there’s more memory available to distribute the write operations. A bigger drive is also much less likely to run almost full, which for some drives can be really, really hurting their lifespan. Imagine the drive has to constantly write to the same 5% of the disk then these 5% get exercised a whole lot more when the firmware does not shuffle disk space around to account for this kind of wear.
Don’t buy cheap SSDs!
If you can get 2TB for $100 or $200 I’d rather opt for the latter, usually there’s good reasons including way better performance to do so.
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Something like that. Some brands (eg Samsung) have drives that have modest ratings for endurance but in tests will often shoot far beyond that. For example the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB had a rating of around 75TB but when tested one of the drives hit more than 2400TB.
https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/
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It’s figuratively the “best before date” for SSDs. The vendor is making a claim that a hardware error will not occur beforehand, but when it does, you can RMA the drive and get it restored or (more likely) replaced. Hence the overshooting.
Same with clock speeds for CPU, GPU and RAM. The overclocked graphics cards are simply selected to run at miniscule higher speeds but most non-overclocked card can be overclocked to that level anyway.
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