Getting the most from your SSD

"An SSD drive is a worthwhile investment, but like any storage device, it can fail. In fact, failing isn't that uncommon. As with your spinning drives, you should always set up a good backup solution, and you can do plenty to take full advantage of your SSD, but you can also take steps to maximize your SSD's lifespan."

Lifehacker site has tips to maximize the life of your solid state drive.

Hope these will be helpful to you.

 

I was wondering how much space left does SSD drives start performing slow? I have a 128 GB Crucial SSD and have 30 GB's of space left. I have windows, 3d programs, and games installed on it. Still performs great but I was just wondering about how much space left will it start slowing down?

 

It has already started. (I would say you have too much data on the drive).

I would leave ~25GB free space in addition to 30% 'unallocated' space to ensure the drive gives maximum sustained performance over time.

Anand Lal Shimpi said:

See:
AnandTech - Exploring the Relationship Between Spare Area and Performance Consistency in Modern SSDs

 

You may want to go thru your temp files to free some space. Also, if you have Windows hibernation enabled, but never hibernate, you may want to disable it to reclaim some space.

With 30GB free (assuming you have a full partition of all 128GB), I don't think you're in major danger (~77% full), but you may want to think about moving some stuff off to a different drive, or finding some ways to free some space (hibernation, temp files, re-adjusting pagefiles, etc.)

 

Yeah I have all my media files and what not on a different 500 GB HD. Perhaps I'll reinstall some of my games and direct the installation files to a different hard drive.

 

Unless you're adding anything new, I don't think you need to worry too much. I'm not going to say not to, but I'd say you don't need to worry about existing installs.

 

Run some benches. 30% free is fine as others have said. Of course if you can offload never a bad idea.

Tiller seriously? 25GB +30%? is that 50% of the drive. If it is and it does run better kind of a high price to pay I would say.

 

No, that's just the price of today's tech. This will improve and is far better than needing to SE a drive to get back to real performance levels vs. using an SSD in name only and getting less than HDD performance from it.

Is it 50%? Whatever, it is what it is. (I'm using 130GB out of a 256GB AND a 512GB SSD right now - nothing is ever 'unused' it is simply how it is used - for the purpose at hand).

 

@Cudacores - one last thought. Have you ran something like SSDlife on your drive? It should give you a report what the controller thinks about your drive. Give it a run, and see what your drive's controller thinks.

 

nope, how can I has download?

 

Grab SSDlife *PRO* from ssd-life.com. ( The free one wouldn't load for me) . Anyway, I grabbed the portable version, unzipped it, and ran it. Another option is CrystalDiskMark Info which also reports on SSD life.

In regards to the 55% unformatted/spare area, balderdash! The sweet spot for this is somewhere around 28% - 30%. See http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...rage/705477-840-pro-speeds-3.html#post9060914 and http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...rage/705477-840-pro-speeds-3.html#post9062280

 

Is there a way to direct my downloads to a separate harddrive other than the SSD my operating system is installed? I know how to direct where programs are installed... but how about downloaded files directly from the internet that is top secret... if you know what I mean.

 

CudaCores, Most any user folder can be redirected to another drive; Redirect a folder to a new location

 

I know but is there a way to save the internet downloads directly to a separate drive automatically other than transferring the downloads manually from primary drive to separate drive.

 

"Save as" to a location on the HDD.

 

It varies depending on what browser you have - for IE 9 How-To Change The Default Internet Explorer 9 Download Folder

 

Also for Mozilla browsers:

• Type about:config into the address bar

• enter

• double-click browser.cache.disk.enable to set the value to False

• right-click anywhere

• New

• Integer

• Preference Name "disk.cache.memory.capacity"

• value memory size in KB. enter 32768 for 32MB, 65536 for 64MB, etc.

• restart browser