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The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/Crass_Spektakel on 2024-11-08 15:27:29+00:00.
Recently Steam released Steam Recording which records the last two hours in the background on your drive to allow you to make snapshots.
Problem though, at the best rate it writes around 7MByte/s to the drive, around 25GByte/hour. Typical SSDs are only rated around 1-2 PByte, so using this feature a lot can easily reduce the life time of your SSD quite some. It won’t kill it outright but reducing its life time by half is a reasonable assumption IF you use it at highest quality a lot - educated guess, from 6 to 3 years.
Alternatives:
1.lower quality = 1080p at 1MByte/s reduces the stress by around 85%.
- use another drive. This can be changed within Steam. Mechanical hard drives are mostly immune to write wearing but also tend to be noticeable loud. Or use some cheap 128GByte USB stick for €5 and just throw it away after two or three years. Only requirement, a write speed of at least 10, better 20MByte/s. Pretty much any USB stick should be able to do that.
I personally use a RAID0 from 2x10TByte HDs, mostly to store bulk data. This tends to be quite noisy at times with Steam Recording in the background. I tried an older 32GByte USB stick, that one was a bit small, at least if you actually created clips which eats into storage quite some. I guess I’ll get myself some bigger USB stick.
(Crap I just remember that I paid €500 for my first 40 Mega Bytes hard drive in 1990. Nowadays I have made pictures with my camera too big for that drive. Shit got cheap.)