Tips for maximizing SSD life on Windows 7

Question

What can I do to make sure my precious investment lives as long as possible?

I have Windows 7 machine with a single drive which is SSD 256Gb and a daily backup system.

Answer 1

Make sure TRIM is enabled. Check the health and estimated life span of your drive with SSDLife.

Answer 2

I have searched for this and I don't find much info. I think SSD's may not have many tricks to optimize life, because there are no moving parts. You can limit how much it gets used by disabling hibernation (so it doesn't write gigs of ram info the disk every time it sleeps), and by using the windows power settings to turn off drives when they're not in use (click start, type power edit, press enter, click advanced, go to hard disk section).

Answer 3

TRIM is the main thing. It will help the SSD avoid moving around (and so wasting writes on) data you've already deleted. For TRIM support you need an SSD that supports TRIM, OS support for TRIM (which Windows 7 has) and storage driver support for TRIM (currently only Microsoft and Intel drivers support this).

Another thing you can do is make sure you've got enough RAM so that you don't end up thrashing the pagefile.

Mostly the factors that determines the life of an SSD are on the inside of the SSD. One thing you can do is but as big an SSD as possible, since that gives it more flash to wear over. But it seems you've already done that.

Answer 4

Here's what I did:

1. Disabled hybrid sleep (no 3Gb write each time computer goes to sleep)
2. Turned off scheduled defragmentation (not sure if it does anything for SSD life)
3. Turned off System Protection (I have Windows Home Server For backup)

I could not find how to disable pagefile, but I don't think it is used often with 4Gb memory.