How SSDs work and what you can do to make yours last longer

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  1. Posts : 1,255
    Windows 10 Pro
       #40

    badrobot said:
    But aren't SSDs supposed to have longer life span compared to conventional hard drives? From the very beginnning we were told that SSDs are less likely to die faster because it has no moving parts. Or is that just a marketing BS?
    In the early days of SSDs the longer life and reliability was largely an unrealized potential. That is a common situation with new technology. It takes time for manufacturers to understand the new technology and develop manufacturing techniques. In the early days such knowledge simply did not exist. The development of conventional drives was a long and difficult process.

    At the present time quality SSDs will usually outlast conventional drives. They are also faster, consume less power, and have better resistance to physical shocks. That latter is particularly important in laptops. The only serious issue at present is that they are still rather expensive in the larger sizes. That will change, as is already happening, with a larger market share and as better manufacturing techniques are developed. Conventional drives were very expensive when first introduced.

    There is little doubt that some form of SSD will eventually completely replace conventional drives. But we aren't there yet.
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 27,164
    Win11 Pro, Win10 Pro N, Win10 Home, Windows 8.1 Pro, Ubuntu
       #41

    Page file!
    Page File! My Page file

    About 10 programs running, and:
    How SSDs work and what you can do to make yours last longer-image-005.png

    I do have some software that uses it, but when it's not being used, neither is my page file, so onWindows 10 specially,
    No need to worry about writes there,

    If on wants to worry about writes, then take a look in Resource Monitor at the disk column while using your browser.
    How SSDs work and what you can do to make yours last longer-image.png
    You could use a RAMDisk, which also speeds up loading already cached site:)
    But then you're 's boot time will take a bit longer
      My Computers


  3. Posts : 1,191
    Windows 11 Pro x64
       #42

    LMiller7 said:
    In the early days of SSDs the longer life and reliability was largely an unrealized potential. That is a common situation with new technology. It takes time for manufacturers to understand the new technology and develop manufacturing techniques. In the early days such knowledge simply did not exist. The development of conventional drives was a long and difficult process.

    At the present time quality SSDs will usually outlast conventional drives. They are also faster, consume less power, and have better resistance to physical shocks. That latter is particularly important in laptops. The only serious issue at present is that they are still rather expensive in the larger sizes. That will change, as is already happening, with a larger market share and as better manufacturing techniques are developed. Conventional drives were very expensive when first introduced.

    There is little doubt that some form of SSD will eventually completely replace conventional drives. But we aren't there yet.
    One thing hard drives have over SSD is retention life. A hard drive can sit idle for dozens of years and still retain its data. This is not true for SSD, In as little as a year or two, if the cells in the SSD are not refreshed, they will suffer bit rot. This is because SSD work by trapping (few!) electrons in potential wells, and the electrons will tunnel out of the wells over time, corrupting the data. Luckily the way ewe usually use SSD, this is not an issue.

    The new phase-change memory like Intel's Xpoint do not work like SSD, more like hard drives - data is stored by making a semi-permanent change in state of the material (like magnet domain changes in a her disk platter). and thus have a very long retention life compared to SSD. This is the way of the future - faster than SSD, long retention life, byte addressable, and they also do not suffer from wear like SSD.

    BTW the article is useless. Consumer SSD won't wear out for10-20 years for system disk on PC - without doing anything special. And for production file server usage, Enterprise MLC SSD, you can write around 10 Petabytes of data before they wear out.
      My Computers


  4. Posts : 19,516
    W11+W11 Developer Insider + Linux
       #43

    essenbe said:
    Yea, I spent a lot of time watching that test. Every time I hear someone ask if they should move their Page file, I chuckle and think of that test. I thought it would never end.
    And in mean time they leave all defaults for downloads, pictures, music, other MM stuff and everything else on C:\ drive, clean and optimize it, hibernate it and generally abuse it.
    I move all defaults to other disk(s) but that's only to save space and make sure they are not gone if system or disk goes belly-up. It also makes for smaller footprint and full backup.
    It's also pity all things concerning memory chips price went up last year or so, otherwise SSD would already hit same $/GB price as HDDs.
      My Computers


 

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