Ask HN: Is there a website that tracks excessive writes to SSDs in OS/app betas?
7 hours ago
If not, why not?
That way, people can choose whether they want to install various software betas based on how much SSD wear they are willing to accept.
And since this data would be made public and available in one place, software developers would be more careful about excessive logging in their betas.
> If not, why not?
At least on Apple devices, this is not something anyone has to worry about.
For example, on my 2022 Mac Studio daily driver, on 24/7, DriveDx (https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx) reports my SSD lifetime left at 94%.
(I'm aware of the February 2021 "wear-gate" scare involving the first M1 Macs. This turned to be incorrect SSD-wear reporting.)
On my personal computers I keep track of this and ensure nothing goes write-crazy.
On my work laptop though (M3 Pro, 1TB), I’m at ~70% health. Iirc the lifetime writes are at >700TB. I do develop on it, but a lot of it is due to the various endpoint security software that’s always there logging every single possible thing but I can’t do much about it. I expect the ssd to die first in this laptop at this rate, so best I can do is ensure everything always synced/backed up from my local work laptop.
What about people who want their laptop to last 10 years?
Then you probably want something that has replaceable parts and not an apple product (e.g. framework)?
Not trying to discourage you from building your thing, but just figure that's worth considering.
Also, I could see why developers would want excessive logging in their betas, so that's kind of a catch-22 (without the verbose logs it might be harder to fix bugs found in the beta)
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For Macs, treat a renewable AppleCare subscription as part of the cost.
You can replace your SSD without replacing your laptop.
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Well if 4 years decrease SSD life by 6%, then 10 years should decrease it by ~15% - so you have plenty of wiggling space.
Then you probably want enterprise level drives, motherboard, ECC RAM, etc.
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I feel like the only responsible thing is to have a home network with at least one persistent device running 24/7 with large storage for local backups of things, and ideally a E2E cloud backup of the same thing. With this, comes the possibility of using things like Grafana+Prometheus to monitor your personal computer/workstation as well. This is what I've done, together with alerts from various things, and since the recent "excessive writes by codex" issue, also alerts if there is obsessive writing over hours long period from any process on my workstation. Luckily I wasn't hit by the Codex issue myself, but certainly made me consider the issue more generally so, happy accidents :)
Just configure wear leveling in your storage layer. FDE may be the easiest way ti do it. Writes will be done linearly in circular fashion. That makes it difficult to delete stuff, but with encryption it's moot.
why do you think this is a function of betas? or even of OS or app versions?
I guess you've been burned, or are worried about being burned, by some software that generated excessive writes? I think you need to describe that first, since this is a rare phenomenon.
which is probably why there isn't some kind of downdetector infra tracking it.
you know you can access smart counters on any OS, right?
If you are not using bottom of a barrel and you are not writing 4K HD 3H mkv every day then you wouldn't have a problem even with a 0.3 DPWD drive of a sufficient capacity.