Question

I have a IO intensive simulation program, that logs the simulation trace / data to a file at every iterations. As the simulation runs for more than millions of iterations or so and logs the data to a file in the disk (overwrite the file each time), I am curious to know if that would spoil the harddisk as most of storage disk has a upper limit to write/erase cycles ( eg. flash disk allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles). Will splitting the file in to multiple files be a better option?

Answer 1

You need to recognize that a million write calls to a single file may only write to each block of the disk once, which doesn’t cause any harm to magnetic disks or SSD devices. If you overwrite the first block of the file one million times, you run a greater risk of wearing things out, but there are lots of mitigating factors. First, if it is a single run of a program, the o/s is likely to keep the disk image in memory without writing to disk at all in the interim — unless, perhaps, you’re using a journalled file system. If it is a journalled file system, then the actual writing will be spread over lots of different blocks.

If you manage to write to the same block on a magnetic spinning hard disk a million times, you are still not at serious risk of wearing the disk out.

A Google search on ‘hard disk write cycles’ shows a lot of informative articles (more particularly, perhaps, about SSD), and the related searches may also help you out.