Last night I installed the samsung SSD tool to check the health of my drive and do some optimizations. I have had the 512GB
840 Pro for 90 days and was shocked to discover SMART reading were showing that I had written nearly 16TB of data to the drive. A quick check of resource manager showed a constant 4-8MBps write to the drive. Digging down a bit deeper I discovered that my random wallpapers were to blame.
Is there some sort of caching or writing of the wallpapers going on that might be causing these insane writes? Please note that at the time I was swapping background every 10 seconds or so. The offending files are in C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Roaming\DisplayFusion and generally called Wallpaper_N where N is 1, 2, or 3 as I have 3 monitors. Generally there will only be a single instance of this file which is roughly 28MB but I noticed that multiples can appear as well.
Something needs to be done about this right away or a warning needs to be put in place as users could feasibly destroy their hardware by using this software. Please let me know what other information might be helpful in fixing this issues.
I am currently running the latest beta but it holds true on older versions as well. OS was tested on 8, 8.1 preview, and 8.1 official.
Could you try enabling the 'Wallpaper: Generate Smaller Files (lower quality)' option in the Settings > Advanced Settings window? We made a change for 5.0+ to generate higher quality images, but in turn they are much bigger in size. So if you're changing your wallpaper every 10 seconds, that would definitely add up to a lot of data being written to the disk.
It dropped to 1-2MBps which in my opinion is still insanely high. Why is the default to process them this way? Changing them by the default windows process does not cause a write spike.
DisplayFusion needs to read the source image files, then do the scaling/cropping, then put them together to build the final generated multi-monitor image file that it then sets as your wallpaper, all of that requires some disk activity. If it's changing every 10 seconds, then you'll definitely see disk activity more or less constantly, as by the time it's done changing, within a couple of seconds it starts the process all over again for the next set of images.
How big are the Wallpaper_X files now that you've enabled that Advanced Setting?
@Wayne, it would not matter. The writes would simply be on the HDD instead of the SSD.
The big issue here is that there is no sort of warning about the absolutely insane amount of writes hitting the drive. Something either needs to be changed about the way the wallpaper_N file is created or a warning in place for background changes beyond a certain threshold.
That won't remove writes it will simply transfer them to the RAM. The issue still stand that there are huge writes happening which can degrade or kill a drive if gone unchecked. Either the method for the backgrounds needs to be adjusted a warning should be put in place.
Additionally, I would have to toss all my pictures back into the ramdisk every single time I restarted my computer...
why not store the image on a ramdisk? http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/
is free, and that should remove 99% of the writes...
That isn't a solution, it's a work around. People will still use displayfusion normally and have no idea that it's effectively killing their hardware orders of magnitude faster than normal wear and tear would dictate. IMHO this is a pretty big problem, and I noticed it as well and was looking to post the same thing before I saw Ryan's post.
At the VERY least like he suggested it should be an EXPLICIT warning stating that using this option will severely impact your drive life. IDEALLY there should be some code overhaul to alleviate/remove this, be it through server side implementation (not easy to do I'd imagine, and probably costly), or some other method I can't think of. You just can't leave people sitting there wondering why all of a sudden TERABYTES of extra information has been written on their drives just for the sake of (after sleuthing around for a while) a changing desktop background.
We'll add a warning about high disk usage when the interval is set to less than 1 minute.
@Ryan: Regarding the suggestion of using a RAMdisk, you wouldn't need to have your source pictures stored in the RAMdisk, you can just set the "Generated Folder Override" option in the DisplayFusion Advanced Settings to point there. Then all of the writes (which I'm assuming is what you're worried about with your SSD) would go to the RAMdisk. Just figured I'd mention that in case you do want to try that so that you can still have your wallpaper change ever 10 seconds.
DisplayFusion needs to read the source image files, then do the scaling/cropping, then put them together to build the final generated multi-monitor image file that it then sets as your wallpaper, all of that requires some disk activity.
Does DF do this for every image change, even if none of the monitor settings have changed (resolution, # of monitors)? If so, seems that some caching could resolve the insane amount of writes.
@deanis: It does but I didn't really explain it well enough. The actual disk writes come when DisplayFusion creates the final generated image that Windows uses to apply the wallpaper, so there's nothing really to cache, because every time the wallpaper changes, a new image has to be generated, because the images are different.
We've added a warning to the Wallpaper window in 5.1.1 Beta 3 if the interval is set to less than 1 minute.
