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SSD's - How They Work Plus Tips

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Tinman57:

[  Good article on SSD's...  Tells how they work and what to look for in a SSD, plus usage tips.....]

The proper care and feeding of SSD storage

05.13.2013 3:02 AM

Treat a solid-state drive like its mechanical cousin and you could end up in a world of pain. Here's how to handle these exotic beasts.
--- End quote ---



http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038511/the-care-and-feeding-of-ssds-what-makes-these-speedy-drives-hum.html

eleman:
I have 5 tips to add:

1. Move the tmp folder to a hard disk. You shouldn't use your valuable write cycles for temporary files.

2. Move (if you must have one) the page file to a hard disk. I have 4 gigs of ram on my win7, I sometimes get the insufficient memory notification when firefox leaks too profusely and I try to play world of tanks at the same time. With 8 gigs you wouldn't see even that one. So page files are mostly redundant if your specific needs (using photoshop to prepare 10m x 24m banner prints etc.) don't dictate it, get rid of the page file. But if you must have, move it to a hard disk.

3. Move firefox (or ie, or chrome, whatever) cache to a hard disk. Yes this will make it somewhat slower, but your SSD's write cycles would be spared. If the speed penalty is too much, disable on-disk caching completely. On-memory caching will probably do (it does for me).

4. If you use a mail client such as outlook, thunderbird, bat, eudora etc., move the mail storage to a hard disk. Yes, it will degrade performance, especially when you need to search among thousands of mails, but it will help the longevity of the SSD.

5. If you have a busy database running on your computer (you may not even be aware of it. For instance I use Trados, a computer assisted translation tool, and it runs on top of a database.) you may consider moving it to a hard disk. The performance hit will be immense (depending on your usage pattern) though. I don't use this trick personally. I would not want to waste 10-20 minutes a day just to extend the life of a $80 SSD drive by 10%. But if you can bear the performance hit, you can extend the life of the drive.

Stoic Joker:
SSDs, and solid-state storage in general, have a disturbing tendency toward binary functionality. -The Article
--- End quote ---

A disturbing tendency towards binary functional... LOL ...We used to just call that "light-bulbing" ...Nice to know they have a fancy new name for it now.

Until there is a recovery option that I can do myself I'll be sticking with the (good) "old fashion" mechanical drives.

f0dder:
I stopped reading the article at
With hard drives, the faster the spindle speed, the faster the drive. The amount of cache also comes into play, but by and large, a 10,000-rpm drive is faster than a 7200-rpm drive, which is in turn faster than 5400-rpm and 4800-rpm drives. That’s an easy and intuitive metric for comparison shopping.
--- End quote ---

..if they get something as simple as that wrong, I don't want to waste my time reading the rest.

mouser:
f0dder can you elaborate -- that sounds like a reasonable statement to me -- though i am an admitted newbie when it comes to hardware.

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