First SSD - Do's and Don'ts

benjii

benjii

benjii

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I've felt the itch and upgraded my i7 920 to a Haswell and with it have bought a Samsung 840 250GB. Having generally stayed up-to-date with all hardware advancements, whether relevant to me or not, SSD's are one that I've not really followed too closely.

I'm aware the writing is the killer for them and I know to only use it for OS and games/critical apps. Is it worth mirroring it to another drive, if so how would I do it? What are the do's and don'ts for SSDs?

Thanks.
 
There is a hell of a lot of writing to be done before you "kill" your SSD.

Enable Over provisioning, that'll make sure you never fill it too close to capacity and should give your SSD a lifespan long enough to make you either never see it "wear out" or until you upgrade anyway.

And ss above, don't defrag.
 
just use it and don't mess with it

if your stuck for space then disable hibernation and reduce pagefile

win7/8 will auto turn off defrag for ssd's anyway
 
Not to thread hijack but could I plug and play an SSD without AHCI mode? As It will be used on a very old AMD that I can't even seem to access any bios until I build my intel machine.


Edit; Managed to get into the bios on this machine. Can't find AHCI though?
 
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should work fine in ide mode,you'll lose speed compared to ahci and trim support

should still have garbage collection to maintain the drive
 
Don't disable prefetch, defrag or the pagefile.
Do run the Windows Experience Index, Windows will then disable Defrag, Prefetch et al on the SSD only, leaving these enabled for mechanical drives that need them.

Don't continuously benchmark the drive, they place un-natural stress on the drive and will slow it down until the TRIM/Garbage Collection catches up.
If you do need to benchmark then do it sparingly.

I'm sure there are more I should be remembering but it'll do for now.
Cheers.
 
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