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I was wondering recently, what is more stressful for an SSD drive in a RAID-1 array, a RAID sync or multiple installations of OSes and software.

Say for example that you have a new server with empty disks in a RAID-1 array, where (on the same virtual drive) you are planning to install a hypervisor (say Hyper-V Server, which should be large), and many OSes and tons of software inside many VMs.

Installing tons of software should be quite stressful for SSDs, especially for read-intensive ones, which are cheap and used quite frequently. So, I was wondering: would it make sense to remove physical drives from a RAID-1 array, leaving only one drive present, before you install all the software? And then, let the removed drives sync once they return back to the array.

Will this be better, worse or the same for the removed drive health? Will the sync overwrite the entire drive once, will it "replay" all the writes done on the active disk (I doubt that), or it will smartly copy only the changed portions of the active drive to the removed ones? My bet is on the last one, but it is just a gut feeling that I have.

I guess, this might be a bit negligible as a difference, dependant on the hardware vendor, and a bit impractical to do, but I thought of asking the question anyway, since I like the details and getting deep into stuff.

user2173353
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    With the write endurance of enterprise SSDs measured in DWPD, it's hardly worth worrying about. – Michael Hampton Jun 28 '20 at 13:16
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    @MichaelHampton Unless you get an end user style SSD where the write edurance is measured in GB/Day and is WAY below 100. – TomTom Jun 28 '20 at 13:19
  • @TomTom I hope nobody here would do such a thing! But maybe I'm too optimistic. – Michael Hampton Jun 28 '20 at 13:25
  • @MichaelHampton I can promise you that is WAY too optimistic. – TomTom Jun 28 '20 at 13:29
  • @MichaelHampton This is mostly a theoretical question, although I do feel that installing Windows OSes and updates for them generates an excessive amount of writes. Imagine if you have 15+ Windows VMs to install and update on the same drive. Regarding the consumer SSDs, this is not what I had in mind, but I guess it depends on the job you want the drive for. If you store data that are not critical and you can do your job cheaper by trashing many cheap drives instead of using an enterprise, durable, and expensive drive, then I guess this is one way to go... – user2173353 Jun 28 '20 at 13:50
  • `If you store data that are not critical and you can do your job cheaper by trashing many cheap drives instead of using an enterprise, durable, and expensive drive, then I guess this is one way to go...` I doubt there are so many use-cases for this though... – user2173353 Jun 28 '20 at 13:55
  • And an enterprise drive isn't that much more expensive, usually. If you know you're going to do a lot of writing, then cheap low-endurance drives will just be a waste of money. Your scenario doesn't really involve a lot of writing, though. – Michael Hampton Jun 28 '20 at 14:00

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