Steam

Whether you genuinely believe what you're saying, or are just trolling, you've managed to nerd snipe me. Whether or not you read all of this doesn't matter, I've channelled my inner no-life tech nerd just because I can. There's a TL;DR at the bottom :)

Not really, or in the kilobytes at best.

Just for proof, I've booted my near-fresh Fedora 40 install just to write this comment. When I finish writing the comment, I'll place the total write operations, amount written, and time period at the end of the comment as the final lines.

Shadowplay isn't a thing on AMD nor Linux, so no.

AMD: has AMD Relive, which, last I checked is a team red solution with near feature parity to shadowplay

Linux: has a few options actually. I'm currently using a lovely flatpak package called GPUScreenRecorder. Is it perfect? No, but does it work when I need it to? Yes!

Every SSD has limited write cycles, no matter how good it is. I spent a good amount of money on my Samsung SSDs, that doesn't mean I'm not going to conserve their lifespan with useless "features".

First, I'll expand on what I said last time.

Every SSD does have limited write cycles, here you are correct. I was never implying that they don't. My point was, the write cycle limit is such a non issue now that this sort of fear mongering over what is generally a negligible amount of data is no longer necessary (I'll come back to this). I've pulled some data from my own systems, as well as re-reviewing Backblaze's AFR report.

My Anectodal Evidence: /dev/sdb (Install Location for Fedora 40)

• Model, Capacity, and "Warrantied Writes": Samsung 850 EVO, 500GB, 150TBW
• Power On Hours: 18517 (Approx just over 2 years)
• TB Written: 51.89TB
• Wear Levelling: 93% of the drive is still "healthy"
• Other Raw SMART Values that would indicate failure: 0

/dev/sdb (Steam Install location since 2017, Drive shipped with faulty controller and was not RMAd as an experiment for my own curiosity)

• Model, Capacity, and "Warrantied Writes": WD Blue '3D NAND', 1TB, 400TBW
• Power On Hours: 8979 (Approx 1 year)
• TB Written: 18.06TB
• Wear Levelling: 100% of the drive is still "healthy"
• Other Raw SMART Values that would indicate failure: 0

Backblaze's Data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-drive-stats-review/ This data isn't perfect as these SSDs aren't necessarily primary write locations, however, as stated, they are the Boot drives for Backblaze's servers, as well as the log and temp file storage for each server. To keep this long comment short, as of 06/30/2023, for (consumer) drives with 100+ models, with 10k+ days, they report:

• 2884 Drives
• 2,293,595 Total drive days
• 45 Drive failures
• 0.72% Annual failure rate

Seems pretty non-concerning to me.

Now to get back to that "negligible amount of data" I mentioned earlier. Obviously we don't yet know how much steam's solution will use... but using some of my old shadowplay clips as a reference...

5 minute clips @ 1080/60 = 1.8GB

Lets take that 1.8GB and assume you're playing 5 hours of games per day, every day, and you're only using that drive for your Shadowplay/AMD Relive/GPUScreenRecorder/Steam whatever cache...

1.8GB * 12 (for 1 hour usage) * 5 hours * 365 Days = 39.42TB/year

Is that a lot of data? Yeah, it honestly is. But most people don't play games 5 hours/day every day. And in this hypothetical situation where that's the only use of this drive, it'd still take a little under 8 years to reach the TBW warranty rating that most (trusted) 500GB SSDs currently have.

TL;DR:

• SSDs aren't as fragile as you think they are
• If the feature is useless to you, then disable it
• If you want to use the feature, but you're really that worried about your drive life, use ImDisk and set your caching locating as a Ramdisk

We're finally at the end! Here's the stats from atop (It's no 1.8GB/5min, but it's definitely more than you think):

• Total Time: 1h36m19s
• Total Write operations: 103318
• Average MB Written per second: 0.5
• Total MB Written (Rounded down to nearest 0.1 MB): 2584.2MB

Edit: Fixed the typos I noticed immediately after hitting post