Will Rainmeter damage my SSD?

[r-o-n-i-n]

Hey there. What everyone knows (or should know) is, that repetitious write/delete operations shorten the lifetime of a SSD.

I love rainmeter, I want to use it, so my question is:

Will using rainmeter harm my SSD? All those widgets,feeds, and graphs... Do they constantly write/delete protocolls?

I am new to this and would like to hear your feedback on this issue.

[smurfier]

Most skins do not write their data to a local file. The only data this is used is located in RAM.

[jsmorley]

Probably the only things that pretty consistently (I think it is once every 10 minutes or some such) writes to the drive are the NetIn/NetOut/NetTotal measures that monitor network traffic. These write to Rainmeter.data to keep track of ongoing network statistics. Also any WebParser-based skins (weather, gmail checker, rss feeds) write to the drive (generally again once every 10 minutes) in the TEMP folder when they hit a web site and download the HTML.

While the amount of writing isn't anything excessive or something to worry about with an SSD drive, (Windows itself is pretty much constantly writing something to the drive) you could always just stay away from these kinds of skins, or run Rainmeter in "portable" mode on a non-SSD drive if you are concerned.

[Mordasius]

Rainmeter writes very little to the hard drive when compared with other programs such as Firefox, Avast! or Photoshop. You can check this by grabbing a copy of Microsoft's Process Monitor and setting up filters like those below.

filter.jpg

If you're still worried about the amount of data Rainmeter is writing to your SSD, you can move C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\Rainmeter to another drive using Link Shell Extension.

Using Link Shell Extension is not as daunting as it first appears and once you get the hang of it you'll find yourself avoiding a lot of writes to the SSD by moving folders from C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming and C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local to other drives.

Just a few words of warning. Whilst it's a good idea to move C:\Windows\Temp to another drive, it's best not to move any of the other C:\Windows folders unless you're sure what processes and programs use them and do take care when moving any of the folders used by Avast! or other anti-virus programs. I managed to stop Avast! writing to the C:\ drive for a while but it got really mad the next time it auto-updated. I had to delete all the links and use the Avast! uninstall utility to disable the self-protection before re-installing it. I didn't trying messing with any of the folders being written to by Avast! after that.

[r-o-n-i-n]

Thanks for all the great input from you guys! Just set-up my new PC (with my first 128GB Vertex 4 SSD inside), so I just wanted to be sure.

The internet provides disappointingly little information on this topic, so I just put my question in here. You pretty much eradicated my concerns and I will use rainmeter from now on to improve my user-experience.

I guess I might move the roaming/app datafolder from my c:\ drive to one of my HDDs just to make sure, and I will definately install that process-monitoring software referred to above.

I primarily use illustro extended and a clock from another skinner which combined make a pretty neat desktop so far. Glad I can keep on using it =)

Thank you all!

[Mordasius]

I guess I might move the roaming/app datafolder from my c:\ drive to one of my HDDs just to make sure, and I will definately install that process-monitoring software referred to above.

Please don't move your entire C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming folder to another hard drive.

Just install Process Monitor and load it before running one of the programs that you use a lot. Run the program for 10 minutes or so and then switch to Process Monitor to see what it has been writing to your SSD. Then just move any frequently used \AppData\Roaming sub-folders to another hard-drive. No need to move everything in the \AppData\Roaming or \AppData\Local) folders.

Also, please note that there is no need to leave Process Monitor running if you're not using it to see what programs/processes are writing to your SSD.

[r-o-n-i-n]

Awesome tipps! Thanks a lot!

[raidho36]

I am not concerned about SSD lifetime, provided I don't own one, but here I have the same issue question in general: too much disk usage.

Last time I have built my own skin for rainmeter, it had used LED lights gauges to indicate load levels, and border values were represented with rapid load-based randomized blinking. Rainmeter didn't seemed to RAM cache these files. That alone caused disk load to be between 50 (at best) and 200 (at worst) reads per second (there was 4 gauges at 50 fps), with 20 Kb gauge files that is rougly 0.5 Mb/s constant disk load; my HDD access indicator was lit constantly, on top of which I had noticed slowdown of many HDD-extensive operations, they were taking longer than usual.

Is there any way I force Rainmeter to cache these files into RAM? Or instead I should have ramdisk for that? Latter is entirely possible with windows, although I'd preferred Rainmeter to do that on it's own.

[Mordasius]

.. rapid load-based randomized blinking.

sounds like a CPU intensive rather than disk-usage issue to me. Perhaps you could post the code for the skin you are using (between

Code: Select all

...[code] tags) so that we can see what is going on.

[raidho36]

Knowing that Rainmeter is very far from "lightning fast", you'd assumed it was CPU problem, but I actually performed some measurements, and the CPU load was under 5%, while HDD load was above 250 Kbps. I know all right that high fps means high processing power consumption rates, 2% cpu over 50 fps on a neat widget was a fair trade. But having Rainmeter to reload graphics from disc every single time you change it - was not.

Sorry, I couldn't post the code because I had lost it long ago, and, if it makes it any easier for you to just guess, it involved a lot of LUA scripting and extensive use of changing "ImageName" of bitmap meter.