What to do and not to do on SSD drives in Windows.

If you are running Windows 8 on an SSD you need to disable fast start up or hibernation to prolong the life of the drive.


Storage talk: Understanding your solid-state drive | How To - CNET

Not really. If you need more gigabytes than you can do some of the stuff in that article but otherwise totally not needed.

Newer modern ssd's will last longer than you will have use for it bud. No need to worry about writes and the likes.

from that site
"So how long is long? To help users estimate how long an SSD will last, SSD vendors such as OCZ have come up with formula: a drive's life span equals its capacity multiplied by its write endurance rating, divided by the average daily writes. For example, the 120GB Vertex 3 SSD has a write endurance rating of 3,000 cycles. If you write 50GB on the drive daily, the total number of days the drive will last before becoming unreliable is: (120 x 3,000)/50 = 7,200 days, which is about 20 years. If you write an average of 100GB a day, the drive would last about 10 years."

lol just stop worrying about the life of your SSD, by the time its unreliable tech will have moved on and you wont be using your SSD anyway

Id assume any solid state drive would outlast every normal drive by at least ten years! No moving parts

No need to worry about SSD life, other components might fail before the SSD.

I can tell all of you from personal experience to not get too comfortable with the SSD's. Logically, you would think that they would have a much lower failure rate than a standard drive since they are all electronic, but I am not sure this is true. I am a computer technician and support systems which use these drives, and they seem to fail just as often as standard drives. I do not have any official numbers or failure rates , however. To make matters worse, most of the time when they fail, it is virtually impossible to recover data from them because they just die and the PC no longer even detects they are installed. These drives are memory chips on a circuit board. If the board goes bad, the chips can sometimes be moved to a good one by a recovery agency, but if the memory chips fail, your data is lost! Data recovery agencies also charge big bucks for recovery!! Moral of the story is, keep your stuff backed up!

Yes, they do fail about as often as their mechanical counterparts - that's kind of the point I usually make to articles that seem to impart the idea that you shouldn't put normal OS mechanisms like these on your SSD. Gen 2 and newer generally have at leastthe life expectancy of a regular mechanical disk, and usually moreso. Assuming the SSD in question is using a decent controller and firmware, of course, treating it differently isn't really all that useful. You made the point I would have liked to make without meaning to, and probably better than I could have too.

Most of the newer SSDs come with their own optimisation/tuning software, which then sets everything for best performance and endurance for the system. The Samsung SSD Magician, for the SSD in my tablet, optimises the SSD as well as the OS, so that such things as Super Fetch, Defrag, Indexing are all disabled from the outset.

mikekoz said:

I can tell all of you from personal experience to not get too comfortable with the SSD's. Logically, you would think that they would have a much lower failure rate than a standard drive since they are all electronic, but I am not sure this is true. I am a computer technician and support systems which use these drives, and they seem to fail just as often as standard drives. I do not have any official numbers or failure rates , however. To make matters worse, most of the time when they fail, it is virtually impossible to recover data from them because they just die and the PC no longer even detects they are installed. These drives are memory chips on a circuit board. If the board goes bad, the chips can sometimes be moved to a good one by a recovery agency, but if the memory chips fail, your data is lost! Data recovery agencies also charge big bucks for recovery!! Moral of the story is, keep your stuff backed up!

Click to expand...

I was looking into buying an entry level SSD for my older rig but every time I would look at the user feedback (for any of the SSDs I was interested in), there were too many responses that indicated many SSDs were either failing prematurely and/or causing freezing at times. Now, many of these freezing problems were resolved by firmware updates but some of these updates took over 1 year to get posted for download and there were several complaints about "having to live with problems for so long." And, the biggest deterrent for me came when I saw that Crucial just posted a firmware update, for one of their SSD drives, that "must be installed on a clean hard drive!" Wow, that's nice... I hope all those poor souls did a backup! So, I'm sticking with the old spindle drives for now because I know I'll (most likely) get a bad SSD with my luck!

After a lot of research, I found that Samsung and Intel appeared to be the most reliable of all SSDs and had the best reputation of all brands. OCZ seemed to be the most unreliable and some had come up with unflattering names for the OCZ acronym.

Thanks Ray8,

If I had a super rig I would definitely take the chance but my old rig has been servicing me well since circa 2004-2005 so I don't want to rock the boat because it still really meets all my needs... and its relatively fast too.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Ray8 said:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Click to expand...

Yepper!

What a Difference a Day Makes!

norepli said:

I'm sticking with the old spindle drives for now because I know I'll (most likely) get a bad SSD with my luck!

Click to expand...

So, my wife overheard me talking about SSDs to a friend and then she goes out and buys me a Patriot Pyro 60GB SSD (I guess she felt bad after spending a ton of money on QVC stuff). Anyway, I threw it in my old Dimension 8400 and its working fine; however, its only running at AHCI/SATA 1 speeds because that's the best the old rig can do! However, I have noticed some improvements so here they are:

Read speeds increased from an average of 53mbps (old 40GB) to 113mbps (HDTune free).
Shed a few seconds off boot time (it was already fast at about 10-12 seconds to the desktop).
Improved temperatures (case running 7 degrees (f) cooler - now running 3 degrees (f) above room ambient).
Easy install, no instructions, BIOS recognized, loaded system image from backup, BOOM done!
Downloaded Patriot SSD Firmware Updater and updated to the current version.
Its hard to judge any overall speed improvement because it was already fast (for the things I normally do).

FYI,

norepli