Maintenance of SSD Drives

SSD drives should not use fragmentation defragmentation

Defragmentation is a good way to deal with the slow-down of mechanical hard drives, but for SSDs, it is torture. The write times of consumer-level SSDs are limited, and fragmentation will greatly reduce the lifespan of SSD drives. In fact, the garbage collection mechanism of SSDs is already a good disk organization, and more organization is completely unnecessary.

Consolidate small partitions and reduce the number of partitions on SSD drives

Due to the garbage collection mechanism of SSDs, completely deleting files on SSD drives will destroy the entire area where invalid data resides. The process is as follows: first, focus the valid data in the area, move it to a free location, and then completely clear the problem area. This mechanism means that when partitioning, SSD capacity should not be fully divided. For example, for a 128GB SSD, the manufacturer generally labels it as 120GB, reserving some space. But if you only partition 100GB and leave more space, the performance of the SSD will be better. This reserved space will be automatically used for internal optimization operations of the SSD, such as wear balancing, garbage collection, and bad block mapping. This approach is called small partitioning.

Reducing the number of partitions is another concept. This is related to the impact of 4K alignment on SSD drives. On the one hand, the mainstream SSD capacity is not very large, and the more partitions, the more waste of space. On the other hand, too many partitions can easily lead to partition misalignment, and the performance of the disk area near the partition boundary may be affected. The simplest way to maintain 4K alignment is to use the partition tool built into Win7. This ensures that all partitions are 4K aligned.

Reserve sufficient remaining space on SSD drives

The more storage on SSD drives, the slower the performance. If a partition is in a state of usage exceeding 90% for a long time, there is a greater possibility of SSD crashes, and most disks will also experience performance degradation.

Update firmware on SSD drives timely

Firmware is like the BIOS on the motherboard, controlling all internal operations of the SSD drive, which not only directly affects the performance and stability of the SSD drive, but also affects its lifespan. Excellent firmware includes advanced algorithms that can reduce unnecessary writes to the SSD, thereby reducing the wear of the flash memory chip, maintaining performance and extending the life of the SSD.