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Comment by exitb | Hacker News Reader

It's great fun to put SSDs in retro machines, but I usually opt to use SLC drives for SSD-unaware operating systems. It supposedly can have two orders of magnitude more cycles before the cells start to die. On the other hand, there's lots of conflicting information out there, so not sure if it really makes that much of a difference.

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You probably don't run 24/7 disk activity on these retro machines, so SLC is probably not worth it?

Especially now that the consumer SSD market has entirely moved on to TLC and QLC, there isn't a new SLC drive you can buy for a reasonable price anymore. Even if a TLC drive would wear out more quickly in an old SSD-unaware system, they are so cheap at this point that it's not really worth worrying about.

I think it’s worth worrying about on an iBook. The hard drive is in between the motherboard and the palmrest, so replacing it basically involves taking the entire machine completely apart (including having to deal with a ton of really tight snap points). It’s definitely not something you want to do more than once, and I’m not sure how many disassembly cycles the 20 year old plastic can take.

If you do want some insurance, the old over-provisioning trick should still work to prolong the life of the drive when used in a system that doesn't support TRIM. Format the drive on a modern system that does support TRIM, or secure erase it with the manufacturers utility, then create a partition which doesn't fill the entire drive and use that on the classic system that doesn't support TRIM. As long as the system never writes to the unpartitioned area it will remain in the TRIMed state and allow the SSD controller to use it as slack space.

Great tip, I haven't heard of that before.

This kind of sounds like a use case where 2nd hand enterprise SSD's (Ebay, etc) might be appropriate.

Those things fairly commonly still have a shed load of endurance left, though it is a luck of the draw thing.

Particularly if you’re running OS 9 or older Classic Mac OS, as it barely does anything that isn’t user-initiated, which naturally means a lot less disk activity.

Even if you did, there's no way it could ever write so much data

Old tryhard MLC/TLC controllers tended to lock up and/or slow down when used for boot disks and/or used with OS that had no ATA TRIM command support to explicitly unallocate disk sectors. For this reason, SLC disks and CompactFlash under 8GB were used to be recommended. But that's like 10 years ago.

It definitely speeds up the data transfer rate and makes them a lot faster, a better experience. Sadly you're still limited to 1 processor core in a world where most computers that are in active use have at least have 2 processor cores.

For example I bought a "PiStorm" for my Amiga 1200 computer that uses the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B for processing power (RTG Graphics, RAM, and data storage too via the SD card) and it made my Amiga 1200 useable for daily driving but it's the 4 core Raspberry Pi 4 Model B doing all the heavy lifting, not the Amiga. All I use is the keyboard and the proprietary bespoke chips when playing games that "hit the hardware".

Even with 0.3 DWPD drives you need to write constantly, 24/7, to reach the claimed TBW in years.

If you are particulary paranoid then just overprovision by bying a larger drive.

Yeah - I've killed several "fancy" Samsung SSDs due to spending lots of time in swap. One might think a 25 MHz VAX SOC (VAXstation 4000/30) with 24 megs of memory wouldn't be able to do I/Os fast enough to kill a modern SSD within the span of several years, but one would be wrong :)

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