Hard drive maintenance - Solid State Drives

[phil bottle 9,743]

I'm in need of some advice. Seems to be conflicting on the interwebz.

 

Now, I know that defragging is a no no when it comes to SSDs. That's about the sum total of my knowledge for tidying/housekeeping my hard-drive.

 

Does anyone have any advice for clearing away the clutter?

 

I'm a novice with these things.

[Sennex 1,903]

Here:

 

http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/oc4yt/running_on_an_ssd_for_about_6_months_any/

 

A lot of that advice is specific for that SSD though, so post up what you have, as the advice might change slightly.

[Diddums 4,346]

Haven't you got a Sammy EVO? Same as mine. I usually just uninstall whatever I can, run CCleaner, and job's a good 'un. Never bothered with anything else really. Windows 7's TRIM facility is excellent for SSDs. Not sure if Sammy themselves have any software in their little magic disk suite or whatever it's called.

 

I love my SSD. Everything loads so fast. So. Fast.

[phil bottle 9,743]

Yep, from I can see you don't need to do much with the Sammy, it's a little beauty isn't it?

 

You know you can get 1000GB SSDs now. Samsung's is about £360 - £380 http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Storage/SSDs/300GB+-+1TB+SSD/1TB+Samsung+840+EVO+Series+2.5%22+SATA+6GB%2Fs+%28SATA-III%29+Solid+State+Drive+SSD+?productId=56768

 

Awesome.

[Diddums 4,346]

How about OCZ then? They've got a PCI-E drive which is 3.2tb.

 

In the right motherboard, it'll write at speeds of 1.2tb per second. Not minute, second.

 

 

Oh you want one eh? Well, for you, mate's rates.

 

£16500. Yes, you read that correctly. Sixteen thousand, five hundred pounds.

 

 

I'll have four in RAID 0 please.

[phil bottle 9,743]

Man, they're so small, if one was to just go missing I'm sure no-one would notice

[Sennex 1,903]

Be careful with CCLeaner

 

Seriously, it will cause loads of wear on your drive when it performs maintenance.

 

Also, I am looking to get an SSD for my PS3. So any suggestions you folks have would be appreciated

[BO7H B4RRELS 2,452]

Be careful with CCLeaner

 

Seriously, it will cause loads of wear on your drive when it performs maintenance.

 

Also, I am looking to get an SSD for my PS3. So any suggestions you folks have would be appreciated

 

I use CCleaner allll the time.  Uh oh...   I usually only use the clean feature to wipe browsing history, etc.   What do you mean by "performs maintenance"?  

[Sennex 1,903]

With how SSD's work, some of them have built in controls to shuffle the data on their own to avoid blank space.

 

These methods cause almost zero wear on the drive.

 

When you run something like CCleaner, a large portion of the time when it performs maintenance, what it does is scans all the data, looks for bad crap, moves it to a new location, and then wipes that location.

 

Thats a large number of extra reads and writes (AKA SSD Stress)that are not necessary. They are especially not necessary because every SSD has a limited number of Reads and Writes before they die

[BO7H B4RRELS 2,452]

So this only pertains to SSD then?  I just have a regular HDD. 

[Diddums 4,346]

Yep. For a regular HDD, it goes like this:

 

 

Uninstall unwanted software from the control panel.

 

Malwarebytes.

 

CCleaner.

 

Defrag.

 

 

Voila, job done!

[BO7H B4RRELS 2,452]

Here's some great news for SSD owners:

 

 

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20140522/353388/

 

May 22, 2014 13:30 Jyunichi Oshita, Nikkei BP Semiconductor Research

 

 

A Japanese research team developed a technology to drastically improve the writing speed, power efficiency and cycling capability (product life) of a storage device based on NAND flash memory (SSD).

 

The team is led by Ken Takeuchi, professor at the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Communication Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering of Chuo University. The development was announced at 2014 IEEE International Memory Workshop (IMW), an international academic conference on semiconductor memory technologies, which took place from May 18 to 21, 2014, in Taipei. The title of the thesis is "NAND Flash Aware Data Management System for High-Speed SSDs by Garbage Collection Overhead Suppression."

 

With NAND flash memory, it is not possible to overwrite data on the same memory area, making it necessary to write data on a different area and, then, invalidate the old area. As a result, data is fragmented, increasing invalid area and decreasing storage capacity. Therefore, NAND flash memories carry out "garbage collection," which rearranges fragmented data in a continuous way and erases blocks of invalid area. This process takes 100ms or longer, drastically decreasing the writing speed of SSD.

 

In September 2013, to address this issue, the research team developed a method to prevent data fragmentation by making improvements to middleware that controls a storage for database applications. It makes (1) the "SE (storage engine)" middleware, which assigns logical addresses when an application software accesses a storage device, and (2) the FTL (flash translation layer) middleware, which converts logical addresses into physical addresses on the side of the SSD controller, work in conjunction. This time, the team developed a more versatile method that can be used for a wider variety of applications.

 

The new method forms a middleware layer called "LBA (logical block address) scrambler" between the file system (OS) and FTL. The LBA scrambler works in conjunction with the FTL and converts the logical addresses of data being written to reduce the effect of fragmentation.

 

Specifically, instead of writing data on a new blank page, data is written on a fragmented page located in the block to be erased next. As a result, the ratio of invalid pages in the block to be erased increases, reducing the number of valid pages that need to be copied to another area at the time of garbage collection.

 

In a simulation, the research team confirmed that the new technology improves the writing speed of SSD by up to 300% and reduces power consumption by up to 60% and the number of write/erase cycles by up to 55%, increasing product life. Because, with the new method, it is not necessary to make any changes to NAND flash memory, and the method is completed within the middleware, it can be applied to existing SSDs as it is.