3 bad habits that are silently killing your SSD (and the easy fixes to save it)
Despite many early challenges, SSDs have proven to be incredibly robust in the real world. Personally, I have several fairly old SSDs, some even date back around ten years! They’re still going strong and, with care, I’ll probably get years more out of them, but I also ended SSDs prematurely, and there are three main habits to cultivate if you want to avoid that for as long as possible.
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Avoid writing-heavy behaviors that burn stamina
How SSDs work and how they stop works, can be quite counterintuitive. Inside an SSD are memory cells. These cells hold an electrical charge that represents a binary value. At the most basic level, if there’s a fee, then that’s one value, and if there’s a much smaller fee, then that’s the other value. In the most robust type of SSD memory (single-level cell), each of these memory cells stores only a single bit.
Every time you change the charge, you damage that cell’s ability to hold a charge by weakening the insulation. In the SLC SSD I just described, this isn’t a big deal, because you’re trying to read the difference between two very different voltage ranges. So even if the charge leaks significantly, you can still know that a cell is in one range or the next. So it takes a very long time for these SSDs to fail from write wear, because the cell has to wear significantly for the voltage ranges to overlap beyond what the controller can reliably distinguish.
Unfortunately, storing only one bit per cell makes SSD very expensive. So most SSDs store several bits per cell. They do this by having several possible charge levels in a cell, each representing a different permutation of bits. It’s really cost effective and allows you to store a lot more data in the same physical space, but the problem should be obvious. You now have to discern between several narrower voltage ranges, which means you’ll run into problems distinguishing these small charge levels much sooner.
There is a lot mitigations built into modern multi-level cell SSDs that I won’t go into here, meaning they actually have immense write endurance. More than most people will need. However, only disc manufacturers promise a certain amount of TBW (Terabytes Written) and anything after that is a bonus.
Which means you should avoid relying on cheaper multi-level cell SSDs as your primary drive for sustained, write-intensive tasks. For example, if you are a video editor, use a secondary SSD as your scratch drive and consider it disposable. On the contrary, cheaper multi-level SSDs are great as video game drives because once you have your games installed, there is relatively little writing to do and you probably aren’t deleting and downloading games on a daily basis.
How to extend the life of your SSD in Windows 11
It’s all about writing cycles.
Keeping Your SSD Cool and Well Managed
So one thing that shortens the lifespan of an SSD is erasing and writing to its memory cells, but the other problem is the heat. Higher temperatures cause all kinds of damage with SSD memory. That’s why the life ratings of these drives include a note on the temperatures at which durability is tested.
Higher temperatures allow electrons to escape their cells more easily, and when you perform the erase-write cycle at higher temperatures, the damage to the insulation layer is more pronounced. Your SSD is not helpless here, it can slow its speed significantly to reduce heat and avoid catastrophic failure, but constant high temperatures will eventually get it.
You can use a tool like HWMonitor to check your SSD temperatures. Leave it running in the background while you work or play a game as you usually would, then check what the maximum temperature recorded is. While this differs depending on the specific drive, you generally don’t want an SSD going above 70°C and many will reduce speed at that temperature anyway, which you don’t want. Try to keep the highest temperatures under load in the 60s or below 60°C as possible.
Install a heatsink on your SSD if possible. In a laptop, make sure the SSD is in proper contact with any built-in cooling solution. In a desktop computer, your SSDs also need access to airflow, so it’s advisable to have at least one case fan moving air over them.
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Modern operating systems already do a lot to extend the lifespan of SSDs. So, unlike the early days, you don’t need to make critical changes to the operating system settings. However, you may want to consider reducing the background activity of your operating system. For example, disable background drive indexing if you don’t really need the instant search functionality. You can do this by selectively disabling search indexing for specific drives. So, for example, a secondary disk containing only video games or a scratch disk for your work does not need to be indexed. That said, it probably doesn’t make a significant difference based on most people’s usage patterns.
Choosing a balanced or energy-efficient power plan, unless you need absolute peak performance from your computer, will also stress your drives less and reduce operating temperatures.
You might also consider moving folders such as your Downloads location or other common locations where your apps save data to a secondary drive.
Finally, there is always a common tip to keep 10-20% of your SSD space open in case of overprovisioning. I don’t subscribe to this myself, as modern disks already have extra space hidden from you and the operating system for this purpose. Although you should keep some space open on your system drive for your page file, full SSDs are definitely slower when it comes to write operations.
9/10
- Storage capacity
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1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB
- Hardware interface
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USB-C 3.2 generation 2×2
- Brand
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Crucial
- Transfer rate
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2,100 MB/s
