How to Extend the Life of an SSD: Tips and Tricks

SSDs or solid disk drives are the most widely used storage devices today in most electronic devices such as desktops, laptops, etc. Their small size means that certain tablets are even starting to arrive, but not only their size is the great advantage, they are much faster than conventional hard drives. Now, these types of drives require care, so we will show some recommendations to extend the life of an SSD.

In addition to their small size and higher transfer speed, SSDs offer other advantages over hard drives, such as higher random write speed, lower power consumption and lower latency, they are much quieter since they do not vibrate, more resistant to the blows and it is not necessary to defragment them, among others.

extend ssd life

However, they also have certain disadvantages, such as the limitation of writes in each cell. That is, depending on the quality of our SSD, the amount of data that we can write to it is more limited than that offered by an HD. However, we can follow a series of general recommendations in order to extend the life of an SSD.

Recommendations to extend the life of your SSD

The Windows operating system has certain functions or features that, without realizing it, can gradually consume part of the useful life of our SSD. In this way, it is important to take measures as soon as possible to help take care of the health of our unit and to extend its real life.

Disable hibernation

This process of the Microsoft operating system is responsible for saving the programs or applications that we have open in RAM memory in a temporary file. The size of this file will depend on the amount of RAM that we have installed on the computer, that is, if we have 8 GB of memory, the file size will be 8GB as well.

What happens therefore when we hibernate our equipment is that, those 8GB will be written to our SSD and when the PC is turned on again, they will be read and later eliminated. This is therefore a wear and tear on the SSD that we can avoid by disabling the hibernation file, since it does not make much sense to have this option activated since the loading times with an SSD are very low. For it:

  • We open a command prompt window with administrator permissions.
  • We write the command powercfg -h off and press Enter .

SSD

Deactivate the Superfetch function

Another of the functions of the Microsoft system that consumes write cycles of our SSD is Superfetch. It is a function that allows Windows to use system memory more efficiently. To do this, what it does is load certain data in a kind of cache that is constantly rewritten on our drive, with which, we will be writing constant information on our SSD without need. Furthermore, if we take into account that solid disk drives offer a higher performance than HD and, therefore, it is not necessary to have this function activated.

To disable Superfeth:

  • We write Services in the search box of the taskbar.
  • We search for the Superfetch service among the list of system services.
  • We right-click on it to access the properties .
  • In the start type we select Disabled .
  • We accept for changes to be saved.

Disable or reduce the paging file

Also in order to reduce the writing cycles on our disk and thus be able to extend the life of an SSD, it is recommended to disable the paging file. This is a file that the system itself creates to use as if it were RAM memory in order to allocate more resources to certain running programs.

If we have a good amount of RAM on our computer, it will be best to disable the paging file. Now, if we are those of us who are just memory, then we can keep the file but assign a fixed size to reduce, as far as possible, the writing cycles to the SSD. For it:

  • We open the System window, Win + X> System.
  • We select the System information option under Related configuration options .
  • We click on the option in the left menu Advanced system settings .
  • Within the properties window we select the Advanced Options tab and click on the Configuration button in the Performance section.
  • In the Performance Options window we select the Advanced Options tab.
  • In the Virtual memory section we click on Change and that is where we can deactivate the paging file or assign the size we want.

SSD

Avoid automatic defragmentation

One feature that Microsoft’s operating system still has is disk defragmentation. A task that many of us have repeated on numerous occasions long ago with the aim that the system itself reorganized the information stored on our hard drive so that later reading and writing on it would be faster.

However, on SSDs it is not necessary for the stored information to be organized, since there are no moving parts, the information is quickly accessible regardless of its location within the unit. Therefore, we must avoid defragmenting an SSD.

To do this, we must not do it manually and also, we must check whether the system itself has correctly detected our SSD and has disabled or not the automatic defragmentation function. For it:

  • We write Defragment in the search box of the taskbar.
  • We click on the Defragment and optimize drives tool .
  • There we can see whether or not the system is including our drive in the automatic defragmentation process.

Disable drive indexing

Indexing helps Windows 10 know where each file is stored on the disk. On a mechanical disk it’s pretty useful, but on an SSD it doesn’t make any sense. Therefore, it is recommended that you disable this option to avoid constant read and write operations that reduce the life of the disk . For it:

  • We go to Computer and right click on the SSD disk to access the properties of the disk.
  • On the General tab, we uncheck the option Allow files on this drive to have indexed content in addition to file properties.

Avoid performance testing

The fact of checking the write speed of our SSD implies that data is written to our drive, therefore, we will be consuming write cycles without need. It is recommended not to use this type of applications that allow to verify this information, except in exceptional cases.

SSD optimization

In addition to all these types of recommendations, there are certain tools that can help us optimize the performance of our SSD and extend its useful life. In this case, one of the most popular and used is SSD Fresh. A utility that allows us to optimize and take care of our SSD to obtain better performance.

With SSD Fresh we can add new features, see the information of our storage, the state of the cells, know if there are any that may be damaged, etc. But in addition, it also has other features for the care of our disk such as disabling defragmentation, timestamp, prefetch, etc. Download SSD Fresh