For the use and maintenance of solid state drives, the most important one is that the "good habits" developed in the era of mechanical hard drives may not be suitable for solid state drives.

1. Don't use defragmentation

Defragmentation is a good way to deal with the slowdown of mechanical hard drives, but for solid-state hard drives, it is completely a kind of "torture".

There is a limit to the number of erasing and writing of consumer-grade solid-state drives, and defragmentation will greatly reduce the service life of the solid-state drive. In fact, the garbage collection mechanism of solid-state hard drives is already a very good "disk defragmentation", and no more defragmentation is necessary. The Windows "disk defragmentation" function is a product of the era of mechanical hard drives and is not suitable for SSD.

2. Small partition, less partition

It is also due to the "garbage collection mechanism" of solid state drives. Deleting files on the SSD completely destroys the entire area where the invalid data is located. The process is as follows: first collect the valid data in the area, move it to a free location, and then clear the "problem area" as a whole.

This mechanism means that the SSD capacity should not be fully allocated when partitioning. For example, a 128G solid-state hard drive, manufacturers will generally nominal 120G, reserved a part of the space. But if you only divide 100G when partitioning, leaving more space, the performance of the solid state drive will be better. These reserved spaces are automatically used for optimization operations inside the SSD, such as wear leveling, garbage collection, and bad block mapping. This approach is called "small partition".

"Few partitions" is another concept, which is related to the impact of "4k alignment" on solid state drives. On the one hand, the capacity of mainstream SSD is not very large. More partitions means more wasted space. On the other hand, too many partitions can easily lead to partition misalignment, and the performance of the disk area at the partition boundary may be affected. The easiest way to maintain "4k alignment" is to use the partitioning tool that comes with Win7 to partition, so as to ensure that the partitioned areas are all 4K aligned.

3. Reserve enough free space

The more SSD storage, the slower the performance. However, if a partition is used for a long time in a state of more than 90%, the possibility of some solid-state hard drives will be greatly increased, and most hard drives will also experience performance degradation.

Therefore, it is very important to clean up useless files in time, set an appropriate virtual memory size, and store large files such as movies and music on the mechanical hard disk. The solid-state hard disk partition must reserve enough remaining space.

4. Refresh the firmware in time

"Firmware" is like the BIOS on the motherboard, which controls all internal operations of the solid state drive, which not only directly affects the performance and stability of the solid state drive, but also affects its lifespan. Excellent firmware contains advanced algorithms that can reduce unnecessary writing of the solid state drive, thereby reducing the wear and tear of the flash memory chip, maintaining performance and extending the life of the SSD. Therefore, it is very important to update the latest firmware officially released in time. Not only can it improve performance and stability, but it can also fix previous bugs.