6 Things You Shouldn’t Do With Solid-State Drives


Solid-state drives are different from the mechanical, magnetic hard drives in wide use. Many of the things you’ve done with typical mechanical hard drives shouldn’t be done with newer solid-state drives.

Solid-state drives are presented by the operating system the same way mechanical drives are, but they work differently. If you’re a geek, knowing what you shouldn’t do is important.
________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t Defragment

You shouldn’t defragment solid-state drives. The storage sectors on an SSD have a limited number of writes — often fewer writes on cheaper drives — and defragmenting will result in many more writes as your defragmenter moves files around.

What’s more, you won’t see any speed improvements from defragmenting. On a mechanical hard drive, defragmenting is beneficial because the drive’s head has to move over the magnetic platter to read the data. If a file’s data is spread out over the drive, the head will have to move around to read all the little pieces of the file, and this will take longer than reading the data from a single location on the drive.

On a solid-state drive, there’s no mechanical movement. The drive can simply read the data from whatever sectors it resides in. Solid-state drives are actually designed to spread data around the drive evenly, which helps to spread out the wear effect — rather than one area of the drive seeing all the writes and getting worn down, the data and write operations are spread over the drive.


Don’t Wipe

Assuming you use an operating system that supports TRIM — Windows 7+, Mac OS X 10.6.8+ , or a Linux distribution released in the past three or four years (Linux kernel 2.6.28+) — you never need to overwrite or “wipe” your free sectors. This is important when dealing with mechanical hard drives, as files that are deleted on mechanical hard drives aren’t actually deleted immediately. Their sectors are marked as deleted, but until they’re overwritten, the data could be recovered with a file-recovery tool like Recuva.

To prevent this from happening when disposing of a PC or hard drive, people use tools like DBAN or the Drive Wiper tool in CCleaner to overwrite the free space, ensuring it’s full of unusable data.

On operating systems that support TRIM, files are deleted immediately. When you delete a file in your operating system, the OS informs the solid-state drive that the file was deleted with the TRIM command, and its sectors are immediately erased. Your data will be deleted immediately and can’t be recovered.

Some old SSDs don’t support TRIM. However, TRIM was added shortly after SSDs hit the market. Unless you have a very early SSD, your drive should support TRIM.



Don’t Use Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Disable TRIM

If your computer is using a solid-state drive, it should be using a modern operating system. In particular, this means you shouldn’t use Windows XP or Windows Vista. Both of these old operating systems do not include support for the TRIM command. When you delete a file on your hard drive, the operating system can’t send the TRIM command to the drive, so the file’s data will remain in those sectors on the drive.

In addition to allowing for theoretical recovery of your private data, this will slow things down. When your operating system tries to write a new file to that free space, the sectors must first be erased, then written to. This makes file-write operations take longer and will slow down your drive’s write performance.

This is also why you shouldn’t disable TRIM on Windows 7 and other modern operating systems. It’s enabled by default — leave it that way.



Don’t Fill Them to Capacity​

You should leave some free space on your solid-state drive or its write performance will slow down dramatically. This may be surprising, but it’s actually fairly simple to understand.

When an SSD has a lot of free space, it has a lot of empty blocks. When you go to write a file, it writes that file’s data into the empty blocks.

When an SSD has little free space, it has a lot of partially filled blocks. When you go to write a file, it will have to read the partially filled block into its cache, modify the partially-filled block with the new data, and then write it back to the hard drive. This will need to happen with every block the file must be written to.

In other words, writing to an empty block is fairly quick, but writing to a partially-filled block involves reading the partially-filled block, modifying its value, and then writing it back. Repeat this many, many times for each file you write to the drive as the file will likely consume many blocks.

As a result of its benchmarks, Anandtech recommends that you “plan on using only about 75% of its capacity if you want a good balance between performance consistency and capacity.” In other words, set aside 25% of your drive and don’t write to it. Only use up to 75% of your drive’s free space and you should maintain ideal performance. You’ll see write performance start to slow down as you go above that mark.



Don’t Write Constantly To Them

To increase your SSD’s life, you should try to minimize writing to the drive as much as possible. For example, you can do this by tweaking your program’s settings and having them write their temporary files and logs elsewhere, such as to a mechanical hard drive if you have a mechanical hard drive in your computer.

Tweaking such application settings will be going overboard for most users, who shouldn’t have to worry about this. However, you should nevertheless bear this in mind — don’t run applications that have to write temporary files to the drive constantly. If you do use such applications, you may want to point them at a mechanical hard drive where you won’t have to worry about the drive being worn down.
​

Don’t Store Large, Infrequently Accessed Files

This one is fairly obvious. Solid-state drives are smaller and much more expensive per-gigabyte than mechanical hard drives are. However, they make up for it with reduced power consumption, less noise, and increased speed.

Ideal files to store on your solid-state drives include your operating system files, programs, games, and other files that must be accessed frequently and quickly. It’s a bad idea to store your media collection on a solid-state drive, as the speed isn’t necessary and you’ll use up much of your precious space. If you don’t have enough space on your SSD, store your large media collection on a mechanical hard drive. If you use a laptop, consider getting an external hard drive for your media. Mechanical hard drives are still very good at providing a very large amount of storage at a low cost per-gigabyte.



The Source : http://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-things-you-shouldnt-do-with-solid-state-drives/​

 

So it's not a good idea to use the SSD for the projects you are actually working on? Since files could be created and deleted many times in few minutes?

Anyone has 10.000 rpm HDD??

 

Try to do 2 options if you want your SSD to Last longer with long better performance

The way to use SSD Right , Use SSD For The OS Only & HDD Intern For File Storage For Desktop PC
and For Laptop Use SSD As main drive for OS only & HDD Extern For File Storage for Laptop PC
NOTE : If you have more money you can use Main SSD For OS only & Another SSD (Extern Or Intern) For Storage that will make you work faster than ever but it will cost a lot of Money



Yes i have one for my son's desktop : 1TB Western Digital WD intern for desktop

 

Last edited: Aug 16, 2015

How good is compared to a 7.200 rpm HDD? There are real benefits?? Since the price is like a SSD.

 

I Can't tell Because Speed of rpm isn't going to improve the performance of Games Or 1080P Or 4k Videos but it will access files very fast & that what I'M Sure about

1TB Western Digital WD intern it did comes As Built-in with the desktop since my family own company that Make Custom Gaming PCs and Laptops in Africa

if you want to go with 10.000 rpm HDD , i advice you to buy SSD instead + Another HDD for storage since HDD offer more GB for less money

 

Last edited: Aug 16, 2015

With OSX Yosemite, Apple removed TRIM support for SSDs which are not manufactured by Apple.
However, OWC claims that their "Mercury" SSDs feature a built-in equivalent to TRIM.

On my Macbook Pro, I have an SSD for the OS and applications; I swapped the optical drive for a mechanical hard drive on which to store data files (including my audio project files, iTunes folder, and files that I download).

 

OSX 10.10.4 re-enabled trim support. No need for any 3rd party utilities but you need to use the terminal:
sudo trimforce enable

 

Don't defragment, enable TRIM support in your OS and read/write as much as you want. The drive will still last at least 10 years. And let's be honest, in 10 years 256 GB - 1024 GB SSD will be obsolete anyway.

 

I always redirect pagefile.sys to the mechanical drive as there are many writes and rewrites to this file. Hiberfil.sys can also be relocated for those who allow their computer to hibernate.

 

I use 4 - 7200RPM HDDs in a desktop tower. 1 OS, 1 VST, 1 SAMPLES, 1 AUDIO. There is no benefit for me moving to SSD other than shaving seconds off of my boot up time.

7200 RPM mechanical drives are PLENTY fast enough for our type of work, and more reliable in the long run.

 

Some of these things are myths, not related to current drives, for example:

Don’t Use Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Disable TRIM
That advice is quite stupid as it is. First off it doesn't consider dual-boot scenarios, and secondly there's GC (Garbage Collection) which every drive do on its own (no need for specific OSes) and it's actually doing better job than TRIM most of the time. You can think of Trim as an auxiliary garbage collection.

Don’t Fill Them to Capacity
Nearly all drives use over-provisioning, with NAND memory usually few gigabytes higher than user-fillable space. For example 120GB drive has in fact 128GB of capacity, but the last 8GBs is reserved.

---
However, they make up for it with
reduced power consumption
That's correct only in few cases, usually 2.5" SSDs consume roughly the same power as 2.5" mechanical drives, OCZ even more than that.

less noise
No constant noise, but they tend to whine and squeak often

increased speed
That's correct.
---
What drives me mad these days is VMWare Workstation always writing suspend state on my SSDs. It's 3GB per write. I disabled suspend state, yet everytime I power off the PC before powering off VMs, there goes another 3GB of endurance

 

Last edited: Aug 17, 2015

what about power loss with these ssd's?

 

You seem to know quite a bit about SSDs, but I disagree with your assessment of what TRIM is and isn't. TRIM and GC don't perform the same function, although one manufacturer made a statement that the GC function of the SandForce controller in his company's drives is as good as using TRIM. Unfortunately, his misinformation is still around today, despite the developer (LSI at the time) laying out the truth as concisely as possible. Only the OS (via TRIM) can tell the GC function which data has been deleted. Without it, GC only knows which sectors should be cleared after the OS writes new data to them. It moves invalid data around constantly, uselessly writing over and over and causing performance to slow (to a crawl in some situations) and wearing the drive prematurely.

That's my understanding of it. Your mileage may vary, etc.

EDIT: I ran tests when my SSD was new, then at two months without trim, then at four months with TRIM now enabled:

 

Last edited: Aug 17, 2015

RE: OP: Articles titled "N-things..." automatically get a frown from me due to this modern dumbing down of good article-writing into clickbait listicles.

"Don’t Defragment

There are benefits to making file parts contiguous (but not whole disk layout optimization) on SSDs. You should get slightly faster file access, and any file contiguous-ing makes file recovery easier due to how recovery apps work. https://www.google.com/search?q=jkdefrag+SSD

RE large number of writes, (good ones ) can handle it. http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

The article series above touches on this. If you want SSDs with more likelyhood of power loss protection , try server-grade/pro editions of SSDs. Spec sheets may list this, or not.

<@FMA1394> the intel 730 kind of does

INsight: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/storage-news/rumor-control-intel-730-data-loss-protection/

 

Last edited: Aug 18, 2015

Not many aware SSD read and write performance. Macbook Pro with 128GB PCIE SSD has read over 1GB/s and write about 500MB/s but other capacity e.g. 256GB onward has Read over 1GB/s and write OVER 1GB/s!

 

I've had 15K RPM HDDs more than a decade ago. Started with adding a SCSI 15K RPM drive as a system drive. 18 Gigabytes. Had a 3.7 vs 8.0 msec access time and really did boot faster.

But, these days it's not worth it for audio.

 

Hi there,

I have a Crucial SSD M550 (512 GB) for 14 months now, installed on an Imac mid2011,

I first used the Trim enabler utility for a few months then I did a fresh install with dual boot and WITHOUT trim enabler (both system partitions on the SSD),

just ran a test with Blackmagic Diskspeed test and still got pretty good results I believe :



I use a lot Kontakt and big libraries (meaning libraries with sometimes a lot of files, like thousands of small files),

Some of them are also installed on the SSD and others on the internal HDD (7200 RPM) and an external FW (7200 RPM) drives.

It's a good idea to check from time to time the SSD speed with this utility.

Edit : forgot to mentionned that I did read on Crucial Forum that they say it shouldn't be necessary to use Trim enabler tools because they already have internal gestion (maybe it's garbage collection I don't remember). That's the reason I don't use it anymore.
For now it's seems to working good without it, time will tell, it's a bit early to now for sure.

 

Last edited: Oct 27, 2015