Will running a Virtual Machine on an SSD degrade its lifespan?

Question

Since Virtual Machines tend to write their data to one specific virtual disk--therefore on one specific part of the disk--will running a virtual machine degrade the lifespan of the cells on the ssd? Or will the SSD know to spread out the writes to the other available cells (free space) and thus reduce wear.

The host system is running Mac OS X Yosemite.

Solution

No, it will not wear down one part of the SSD. VMs might write to one specific file, but the contents of that file will not be on the same flash cells. The controller on the SSD will take care of that.

Note that this is different from pen drives with flash. For those it would matter. But SSDs come with rather smart controllers which do a lot of things, including wear-leveling.

Comments

[Ramhound]

I will degrade it the same amount if you wrote X GB to the drive. X is the size of the virtual machine's hdd.

[Admin]

possible duplicate of How a large virtual machine disk affects SSD life time

[ganesh]

Yup. I wonder how many people still have first generation SSDs or why they are worrying about wear effects. Modern SSD should last 5+ years under daily heavy load. By that time people have bought new hardware.

[Tetsujin]

Memes take time to be born, live, spread & die - sometimes they never die ;)

[posfan12]

Those controllers aren't so smart in this case. Not sure if this only applies to enterprise solutions, but read: extremetech.com/computing/…