Let's also ensure the SSD doesn't age prematurely.

I was under the impression that when you're streaming the weights from disk because the full model won't fit in memory, that it is solely reading from the SSD, not writing, so it wouldn't be causing wear on your SSD.

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1000100_1000101 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You'd need your OS to support, and be configured to use, a disk mounting option that disables file access timestamps, otherwise reads ARE writes.

	▲	trinix912 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		...and disable swap.

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kmeisthax 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

NAND[0] has a fun thing called "read disturbance" where repeated reads from disk will eventually flip 0s to 1s. You have to erase and rewrite the block before the bits flip[1], or you lose the data, but doing so is the same amount of wear as a write.

[0] I heard this being an issue with TLC, I don't know if it also applied to MLC or SLC.

[1] I suspect in practice they use an error correction code and rewrite blocks that read with corrected errors.

	▲	wtallis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's kinda irresponsible to talk about read disturbance without clarifying that it takes an extremely large number of reads to cause a read disturb error, and it can be corrected by a single rewrite of the data. Read disturb errors are something SSD engineers need to account for, but from an end user perspective it's a smaller problem by multiple orders of magnitude than write endurance, which is already rarely a real problem in practice.

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giantrobot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is and it doesn't. You only get into disk writes if the system starts paging out to disk.

	▲	OutOfHere 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No one can reliably track uses of "it", and definitely not multiple uses, so please take your time to qualify everything explicitly. Currently I have no idea what each "it" is referring to.