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I was recently given two SSDs - OCZ SOLID SATA-II, 128 GB each. At present, they are in raid 0, giving me 256 GB storage and 252 MB/s read rate.

I've been told that SSDs have a limited lifespan and you must take measures to protect them. What are these, and how do I do so?

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We've made a blog post about maximizing the lifetime of your SSD. – Tom Wijsman May 10 '11 at 15:03
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There are various tricks you can use depending on your operating system.

  • If possible have enough RAM in your system so you don't ever need any swap space or page file.
  • Have all temporary storage (/tmp, /var/tmp, %TEMP%, whatever your OS has) point to a RAM disk.

Basically take all the precautions you can to reduce the amount of unnecessary writes to the SSDs.

It's good to still have a hard drive in the system for scratch space or swap / page files, etc.

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I have a 500 GB HDD for bigger stuff, but I wanted to put swap on the SSDs, for speed. Should I not do this? – Thomas O Apr 3 '11 at 22:44
Swap is a sure-fire way of terminating your SSDs early. You'd be much better off increasing your RAM to reduce the need for swap. – Majenko Apr 3 '11 at 22:45
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up vote 1 down vote

What operating system are you using? If you're using a filesystem that supports journaling (ext3 or ext4), you may want to turn off journaling (journaling makes extra writes).

You are generally guaranteed to get at least 1,000,000 writes to each block, so you will probably want to upgrade your storage anyway by the time it starts to wear out.

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I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 and/or Windows XP Pro SP3. – Thomas O Apr 3 '11 at 22:42
On Windows XP, journaling is disabled by default, so no worries there. (Source)‌​. Disabling journaling on Linux is done in fstab using the noatime switch. Google it. This may help – tjameson Apr 3 '11 at 22:59
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