Handling TC on a SSD questions.

[Spiderkeys]

I got a brand new SSD and cloned an OS, with Total Commander on it, and wondering because i've been configuring my SSD to do little writes to disk as possible in a attempt to increase it's lifetime.

I've been concerned a little concerned of the little disk writing TC itself does.

1. Is Thumbnail caching really needed now? Unsure if I should disable it completely or move it to a normal slave drive under preferences.

2. .Br2 files, I presume they hold icon data for your bars, and are they really still needed?, I cannot find a way to disable creation of those, but have considering just linking them with a Junction (Symbolic Link) to another drive.

[Horst.Epp]

Why do you think that this features have a real influence on your SSDs life ?

The br2 files are only written if you change your button bars.
How often do you change them ?

From the help about Thumbnails:
ThumbsLocation= Location of thumbnail cache


And in general if your OS is running from your SSD you cant increase lifetime by fiddeling around on such low usage compared to the OS activities.

[Spiderkeys]

Yeah I know TC doesn't do a huge amount of writing, but I like to look at it, as every bit counts, and yes I do a lot of TC Buttonbars and so do a lot of icon creating, so my br2 file get updated quite often.

Just really wondering are they worth disabling considering the speed of a SSD, as I heard it's good idea to disable Windows Prefetching because it useless now anyway, I wondering if the same applies to TC.

[milo1012]

Just really wondering are they worth disabling considering the speed of a SSD

It's not worth disabling if you have preview images that might need quite a time to render a thumbnail,
for example PDF/office preview, or very large images (10 MPx+).
Because in these cases I/O performance isn't the limiting factor, but CPU/render speed.

If you don't need or expect to have preview/thumbnails available as fast as possible for such files you may disable it as well.

[ZoSTeR]

Don't worry so much about your SSD. They can take some punishment:
The start and the end of the Tech Report experiment.

[milo1012]

<OT>

Don't worry so much about your SSD. They can take some punishment

Sorry, but such tests are still a matter of subjective interpretation IMO, and confirm one thing:
It's not safe to fill a SSD more than a few hundred times it's capacity or so, or even less(!) if you get a bad model.
I've seen HDDs that ran over 10 years with tons of write, probably exceeding a thousand times their capacity.

Yes, I know: on an average PC scenario it doesn't matter, but for me it leaves a bitter taste every time.
You really shouldn't advertise the endurance of SSDs compared to every-day scenarios.
They can fail sooner than you think, just like any other storage.

So that old rule is more important than ever: do frequent backups of all your important data!

</OT>



To topic: the TC thumbnail cache most likely won't matter to SSDs, on an average usage scenario.

[ZoSTeR]

What I wanted to convey is that there's no point in constantly trying to reduce every minute amount of data written to an SSD.
Just backup your data and don't do stupid things like daily (any) defragmentation or full write benchmarks.

If you've cloned a Win 7 system make sure to run WinSAT once so that the SSD is recognized.

[ghisler(Author)]

You can turn off thumbnail caching in Configuration - Options - Thumbnails by DELETING the path in the "Database location" field.

And indeed .br2 files are only updated when you change the button bar, so they shouldn't be a problem.

[solid]

What's the point of having SSD if you move all the intensive reading/writing applications on another drive?