Any tips on keeping an SSD squeaky clean?

I just bought an intel SSD that was on sale for 80$ on newegg for my new system build. I have read that writing to the drive too much will cause the write speed of SSD's to slow down drastically due to corruption of sectors. I plan on using this for my OS, and for music production, so I will have FL Studio, Ableton live, and Pro tools installed on the main drive, along with some plugins, and VST's and everything that's easily replaceable I will be keeping on seperate hard drives.

I was wondering if there were any tips you guys knew of the keep my writing on the SSD to a minimum after everything is installed? I already found a way to move the windows "TEMP" folder onto another hard drive, so temporary files aren't moving through the SSD. Anything else I should be careful for?

Just use it as you would normally. Really. There isnt a need to tip toe around an SSD.

Great part about SSD's... basically maintenance free. They maintain themselves unless its in RAID, then it can degrade over time but can be fixed by doing backup of the drive, wiping it, then re-imaging it.

No long defrags needed!

Then what is all this fuss I've been hearing about how SSD's write time slows down over time because the drive degrades? There isn't any truth to that?

For example this: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9132668/Analysis_SSD_performance_is_a_slowdown_inevitable_

Granted it was published in 2009, but I can't imagine that much has changed in 2 years.

Trim and garbage collection make this a non-issue with anything but 1st gen SSDs.

What happens is flash can only be written to if it is empty. A new drive is completely empty and only needs to write. A used drive has a lot of files that were deleted, but are still stored in the flash. So the SSD has to erase the flash before it can write to it. Trim and garbage collection go around emptying flash that is storing deleted data so that write speed doesn't degrade over time.

I got this drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167048

I don't see that it says trim anywhere. But on an ebay page for the same drive it says this "The Intel SSD Optimizer utilizes the new ATA Data Set Management Command (TRIM Attribute) to help maintain your SSD performance at “fresh-out-of-the-box” levels, and is specifically designed to run with Microsoft Windows 7"

So, basically anything I read about SSD's have degredation has since been fixed?

tombo12345 said:

I got this drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167048

I don't see that it says trim anywhere. But on an ebay page for the same drive it says this "The Intel SSD Optimizer utilizes the new ATA Data Set Management Command (TRIM Attribute) to help maintain your SSD performance at “fresh-out-of-the-box” levels, and is specifically designed to run with Microsoft Windows 7"

So, basically anything I read about SSD's have degredation has since been fixed?

Click to expand...

ATA Data Set Management Command (TRIM Attribute)
That is the trim talked about. With that intel drive you can install Intel's SSD utility and actually have it force trim right now, or force it to trim on a schedule. I've never looked into it since its only works for Intel drives.

So yes the degradation is gone from single drives. Raiding drives up can still have issues because TRIM commands from the OS (Vista/Win7) does not recognize the RAID controller as a SSD capable of TRIM. Though some drives have a thing that runs automatically on the drive called Garbage Collection and does work in RAID. The thing to not get confused about here TRIM forces the Garbage Collection on the SSD to run, it is doing the same thing. Its that TRIM is the operating system side saying hey I deleted files and I should clean up the drive. GC will run automatically in the background, typically only in idle states to not reduce the drive performance. Example at windows login screen.

I was under the impression that much of the degredation came from hardware corruption, which wasn't possible for software to fix. Is this not the case?

tombo12345 said:

I was under the impression that much of the degredation came from hardware corruption, which wasn't possible for software to fix. Is this not the case?

Click to expand...

No, this is not the case. Any hardware corruption would most likely cause data loss or stop the drive from functioning. No part of the degradation has anything to do with hardware corruption. The degradation is simply the result of the increasing overhead needed to deal with increasing amount of data on the drive and fragmentation of that data.

I looked at this extensively just prior to buying my pair of RAID0 Intel 320s from cyber monday. From what I understood garbage collection is enough and that trim only really helps when the drive is run at near full capacity.

If you are like me and are only using 90GB out of 223GB; GC is enough to keep drive performance from degrading as per anandtech's article. However if you are 90GB out of 110GB no thats not enough and you will see the drive performance degrage

Also just FYI Intel Rapid Storages' next release will allow for full support of TRIM via RAID as long as its used on an intel controller.

Sentential said:

I looked at this extensively just prior to buying my pair of RAID0 Intel 320s from cyber monday. From what I understood garbage collection is enough and that trim only really helps when the drive is run at near full capacity.

If you are like me and are only using 90GB out of 223GB; GC is enough to keep drive performance from degrading as per anandtech's article. However if you are 90GB out of 110GB no thats not enough and you will see the drive performance degrage

Also just FYI Intel Rapid Storages' next release will allow for full support of TRIM via RAID as long as its used on an intel controller.

Click to expand...

That's good to know because I will be floating somewhere between 60 and 70 out of 80. So the drive performs better if it's not so filled?

Mr Alpha said:

No, this is not the case. Any hardware corruption would most likely cause data loss or stop the drive from functioning. No part of the degradation has anything to do with hardware corruption. The degradation is simply the result of the increasing overhead needed to deal with increasing amount of data on the drive and fragmentation of that data.

Click to expand...

Ok that's a relief, thank you.

60gb OCZ Vertex 2 since release, still 100% health according to SMART and it's been on 24/7 since then. Beat to hell, reformatted etc. Enjoy the move to SSD