Windows 10: How SSDs work and what you can do to make yours last longer

Yea, mine's 80 GB too. For what I paid for 80GB, I could come close to buying a 1 TB SSD now.

 

Purchased in 2010 a Crucial C300 128GB SSD complete with data transfer kit which included a USB to SATA cable for £237.

The SSD alone costing £214.90....speeds being much lower than more modern ones, but its still working perfectly, far faster than any HDD.

 

I am actually using my old ssd for the temporary files - as Navy LCDR says no point in moving them from an ssd to hdd but ssd to ssd is reasonable. The main reason I do this is to simply maximise capacity on new SSD more than to prolong its life). I could not detect any loss of performance doing this even though older ssd is slower than new one.

 

Yeah, me too. I paid around $300 for the 80GB when i bought it. I bought it mostly as a learning/nerd experience. So many didn't see much past the "it boots Windows faster" advantage, and they looked at their HDD's and said (it boots Windows in only about 15 seconds anyway, so why does it need to be faster". I felt more or less the same, but once I got the SSD, things made sense. Installing the OS was much faster, launching games was hugely improved, malware scans were super fast, Windows updates would fly. I then became an SSD evangelist and recommended them to everyone.

 

I just relegated my 80GB to testing new OS installs when I want to play on something outside of a VM. So, it's a lab drive now basically.

 

That's another reason not to worry about SSD lifespan; we don't know what we may be using, or saving to buy, in even another 4-5 years. What comes out of R&D labs during that time may blow away even the best of what we can buy now.

 

But aren't SSDs supposed to have longer life span compared to conventional hard drives? From the very beginnning we were told that SSDs are less likely to die faster because it has no moving parts. Or is that just a marketing BS?

 

Electronics have nasty habit of sudden death.

 

Hence tenforums mantra - make regular image backups .

 

I only had to worry about it once, and thought about it before I imaged to the new SSD.
I had a Windows 7 laptop(still have it, but it's Windows 10 now) but no USB to disk adapter(or what ever they're called) to clone with.
So I made a fresh backup image of the 5400rpm HDD,
Then did a clean in stall of Windows 7 to the SSD,
then Imaged my C: partition from the backup to the SSD.
**Note I used Windows 7 own system Image /Backup tool, which I NEVER EVER had a problem with reimaging*Wink**

 

A few years ago there was an ongoing wear test over on Extremesystems Forum on many ssd's to see just how long they could take constant writes and still survive. It was an awesome thread and again bottom line of this massive thread was don't ever bother worrying about your drive dying from writes.

SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

 

Yea, I spent a lot of time watching that test. Every time I hear someone ask if they should move their Page file, I chuckle and think of that test. I thought it would never end.

 

In the early days of SSDs the longer life and reliability was largely an unrealized potential. That is a common situation with new technology. It takes time for manufacturers to understand the new technology and develop manufacturing techniques. In the early days such knowledge simply did not exist. The development of conventional drives was a long and difficult process.

At the present time quality SSDs will usually outlast conventional drives. They are also faster, consume less power, and have better resistance to physical shocks. That latter is particularly important in laptops. The only serious issue at present is that they are still rather expensive in the larger sizes. That will change, as is already happening, with a larger market share and as better manufacturing techniques are developed. Conventional drives were very expensive when first introduced.

There is little doubt that some form of SSD will eventually completely replace conventional drives. But we aren't there yet.

 

Page file!
Page File! My Page file*Tongue*Wink

About 10 programs running, and:




I do have some software that uses it, but when it's not being used, neither is my page file, so onWindows 10 specially,
No need to worry about writes there,

If on wants to worry about writes, then take a look in Resource Monitor at the disk column while using your browser.



You could use a RAMDisk, which also speeds up loading already cached site*Smile
But then you're *Start's boot time will take a bit longer*Zip

 

One thing hard drives have over SSD is retention life. A hard drive can sit idle for dozens of years and still retain its data. This is not true for SSD, In as little as a year or two, if the cells in the SSD are not refreshed, they will suffer bit rot. This is because SSD work by trapping (few!) electrons in potential wells, and the electrons will tunnel out of the wells over time, corrupting the data. Luckily the way ewe usually use SSD, this is not an issue.

The new phase-change memory like Intel's Xpoint do not work like SSD, more like hard drives - data is stored by making a semi-permanent change in state of the material (like magnet domain changes in a her disk platter). and thus have a very long retention life compared to SSD. This is the way of the future - faster than SSD, long retention life, byte addressable, and they also do not suffer from wear like SSD.

BTW the article is useless. Consumer SSD won't wear out for10-20 years for system disk on PC - without doing anything special. And for production file server usage, Enterprise MLC SSD, you can write around 10 Petabytes of data before they wear out.