Use and maintenance of solid state drives

For the use and maintenance of solid-state drives, the most important thing is that the "good habits" developed in the era of mechanical hard drives may not be suitable for solid-state drives.

1. Don’t use defragmentation

Defragmentation is a good way to deal with the slowness of a mechanical hard drive, but it's a complete "torture" for a solid state drive.

There is a limit to the number of erasing and writing of consumer-grade SSDs, and defragmentation will greatly reduce the lifespan of SSDs. In fact, the garbage collection mechanism of solid-state drives is already a good "disk defragmentation", and no amount of defragmentation is necessary at all. Windows' "Defragmentation" function is a product of the era of mechanical hard disks and does not apply to SSDs.

In addition, it is best to disable Win7's read-ahead (Superfetch) and quick search (Windows Search) functions when using SSDs. These two functions are of little practical significance, and disabling them can reduce the read and write frequency of the hard disk. (In Windows 10, this optimization is not required)

2. Small partition, less partition

Or due to the "garbage collection mechanism" of the SSD. To completely delete files on a solid-state drive is to destroy the entire area where invalid data is located. The process is as follows: first collect valid data in the area, transfer it to an idle location, and then clear the entire "problem area".

This mechanism means that when partitioning, do not use the full capacity of the SSD. For example, for a 128G solid-state hard drive, the manufacturer will generally name it 120G, with some space reserved. However, if you only divide 100G when partitioning, leaving more space, the performance of the solid-state drive will be better. This reserved space is automatically used for optimization operations inside the SSD, such as wear leveling, garbage collection, and bad block mapping. This practice is called "small partitioning".

"Few partitions" is another concept related to the impact of "4k alignment" on SSDs. On the one hand, the capacity of mainstream SSDs is not very large. The more partitions, the more space wasted. On the other hand, too many partitions can easily lead to partition misalignment, and the performance of the disk area at the partition boundary may be affected. The easiest way to maintain "4k alignment" is to use the partition tool that comes with Win7 to partition, which can ensure that the divided areas are all 4K aligned.

3. Reserve enough free space

The more storage on the SSD, the slower the performance. However, if a partition is in a state of more than 90% usage for a long time, the possibility of some solid-state drives crashing will be greatly increased, and the performance of most hard disks will also be degraded.

Therefore, it is very important to clean up useless files in a timely manner, set an appropriate virtual memory size, and store large files such as movies and music on the mechanical hard disk. It is necessary to leave enough remaining space in the solid-state hard disk partition.

4. Refresh the firmware in time

"Firmware" is like the BIOS on the motherboard, which controls all internal operations of the SSD, which not only directly affects the performance and stability of the SSD, but also affects its lifespan. Excellent firmware contains advanced algorithms that can reduce unnecessary writes to SSDs, thereby reducing wear and tear on flash memory chips, maintaining performance and extending the life of SSDs. Therefore, it is very important to update the latest firmware officially released in time. It not only improves performance and stability, but also fixes previous bugs.

5. Learn to use recovery commands

The Trim reset command of the SSD can completely restore the performance to the factory state.

With the rapid development of the Internet, people's demand for data and information storage is also increasing. Many storage manufacturers have launched their own portable solid-state drives, and more mobile solid-state drives that support Type-C interfaces and solid-state drives that support fingerprint recognition. .