Wallpaper rewrites

[Brillo2]

Is a file (or files) being rewritten on a hard drive or SSD everytime the wallpaper is being changed? If so, won't rewritting the same file (or files) over and over again wear out the hard drive or SSD prematurely?

 

[seekermeister]

If you are using wallpapers already in W7, it doesn't need to be rewritten to the drive, it only has to be read. If you add a wallpaper it has to be written to the drive once only. I would think that any wear on the drives due to this would be neglible. There are far more drive intensive operations than that.

 

[Brillo2]

If you are using wallpapers already in W7, it doesn't need to be rewritten to the drive, it only has to be read. If you add a wallpaper it has to be written to the drive once only. I would think that any wear on the drives due to this would be neglible. There are far more drive intensive operations than that.

My concern is that if I'm having my desktop wallpaper auto changing every minute, my SSD might be worn out prematurely by having the same area of the SSD being rewritten every minute. Your saying this should not be a problem?

 

[seekermeister]

With the price of SSDs, I can appreciate your concern, but as I said, the wallpaper itself would not be rewriting at each change. But it is possible that some other write function could occur that is in some fashion involved in the process, I really don't know, not being a MS programmer or a hardware developer. In any case, there are other processes that do tend to write on a continuous basis. This can be seen by installing a System Tray program called DriveGleam, which has a both a red and green LED to indicate read and writes as they occur.

If you wanted to know what is going on, you could install Filemon to monitor file activity and Regmon to monitor registry activity. However, if I could afford a SSD, I might feel that my time was more valuable than what any possible wear might cost. Obviously, neither reads or writes can be avoided. Still, I like DriveGleam, because it can alert one to worse activity.

 

[V3xar]

My concern is that if I'm having my desktop wallpaper auto changing every minute, my SSD might be worn out prematurely by having the same area of the SSD being rewritten every minute. Your saying this should not be a problem?

A SSD drive has no moving parts so that almost eliminates the risk of "mechanical" failure

There is no read or write head and no "spin up" takes place.

You really don't need to worry about wearing it out.


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[seekermeister]

My concern is that if I'm having my desktop wallpaper auto changing every minute, my SSD might be worn out prematurely by having the same area of the SSD being rewritten every minute. Your saying this should not be a problem?

A SSD drive has no moving parts so that almost eliminates the risk of "mechanical" failure

There is no read or write head and no "spin up" takes place.

You really don't need to worry about wearing it out.


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Not exactly accurate. While there are no moving parts, SSDs still have wear issues. I'm not certain of the date of the article, but this may help put it into perspective:

SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" article in STORAGE search .com

 

[V3xar]

Thanks seekermeister that's an interesting article. I didn't know a lot of those facts.

A quote from the Intel site:

Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact.

I reckon Brillo2 should be safe with his/her alternating wallpapers.



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