How to treat a new SSD--optimizations and longevity

Question

I was hoping to compile a list of tips/tricks for optimizing and extending the life of SSDs.

I just purchased my first SSD and put it in my laptop, and will soon be installing a pair into my desktop in RAID and have no experience with the new tech. I know you're not supposed to defrag them, but what other advice do you have?

I am running Windows 7 on both machines, and was hoping for advice and instructions for things such as putting the browser cache into RAM (subquestion: I have a card reader in the machine that I never use. Could I use that for reducing writes to the SSD? I plan on putting my dropbox folder on it; any other good uses anyone could suggest?

Answer 1

Really in my experience with SSD's less is more. I was in to aggressively tuning my drives but over time I would actually lose performance. There are few quick steps I follow to make sure the drive is running properly: make sure AHCI is on, Enable Trim, Turn off indexing, and turn off scheduled defrags. Otherwise I just let it be, remember sometimes it is better to just keep it simple. Oh and if you have Intel drives they provide a tool that will do all of this for you (with the exception of AHCI), Link.

After seeing Jakub's post I had to add to this. Some drives will function without AHCI in fact certain OCZ drive do not even support it! Here is a Google doc's link to the manual for the vertex 1.

Directly from the OZC manual:

AHCI is not official supported on OCZ SSDs and may under some circumstances affect performance, specifically during windows installation. Enabling AHCI can result in higher performance in synthetic benchmarks for SSDs and HDDs alike, but can cause hang-ups and intermittent freezes in SSDs since it allows multiple access requests to compete for a drive that is not made to address re-ordering of commands in the queue. We recommend AHCI is set to disabled in both Windows and in the BIOS. Native Command Queuing greatly increases the performance of standard rotational drives but it has no bearing on SSDs.

So basically make sure your drive supports it before enabling it, it may increase performance but will lower stability significantly.

Answer 2

I think you are misunderstanding that the SSD is 'prone to die' from usage. It is not, it will function for MANY years to come (if there aren't any hardware issues that is). The life of an SSD will be just as long as any standard platter drive.

Windows 7 will self optimize for your SSD. You don't need to baby it and stick your dropbox repo on a slow card reader, use your SSD, why would you pay the premium to get the speed and than squander it by babying it?

Defraging is really pointless on the drive as it is not made up of rotating platters. It does not become susceptible to the same delays for read/writes as a hdd with moving parts would. Also there is no point to put the drive through a long read/write, read/write cycle, it does nothing for you. Thats why its not recommended, as there is no benefit, and just reduces performance of the drive.

Each SSD is different, but basically they all will last longer than your usage of that PC.

Just my 2 cents.

Answer 3

A key difference between and SSD and a traditional hard drive is that the SSD has a set expiration date: so many writes to a given storage location and this location will become unusable. Traditional hard drives, on the other hand, have the much more nebulous "mean time to failure". The drive might last forever, or it might die tomorrow; all we know for sure is the average. So much use of the drive and the drive may become unusable.

The key here is that our human psyche is wired to evaluate this to mean that traditional spindle hard drives last longer. Thankfully, this isn't true. For the vast majority of use cases, your SSD will far outlast a traditional spindle drive.