Solid-state drive is becoming the favorite of geeks. In few years from now, mechanical-magnetic hard drives will be replaced by SSD. Although solid-state drives are presented to the users in the say as the traditional magnetic hard drives, but they work quite differently. For any geek out there, it is important to know how to handle SSDs.
More importantly, you need to know what you shouldn’t do with your Solid State Drive. Here are few things jotted down, which you shouldn’t do!
Defragmenting is No-No!
Defragmentation has always been recommended in a magnetic drive for organizing the files better. However, doing the same in a solid-state drive can make unnecessary wear and tear of the drive that reduces life span of the drive. Moreover, it is not actually required in this kind of drive because of the efficient way that the SSD technology functions with. When a user tries to fetch a data from a SSD drive, it reads the scattered block of files with the same pace as it would do with the blocks that are placed closely.
Don’t use wiping tools.
Usually, ‘delete’ function is little different in magnetic drives. Don’t think that your deleted file cannot be recovered from the magnetic drives. When a file is deleted from the drive, the sector is marked as deleted, but the file doesn’t wipe off until another file is overwritten on the same sector. This shows that there are chances that a file can be recovered, even after deletion, which is why magnetic drive users make use of wiping tools like CCleaner, before disposing their old drives. Before disposal of any magnetic drive always wipe hard drive for security.
SSDs support TRIM and upon deletion of a file, the operating system will send out a signal to the solid-state drive, letting it know that the file is deleted with a TRIM command. Once it is informed, the particular sector gets erased completely and your file will be permanently deleted.
Don’t use Windows XP and Windows Vista
If you have decided to make use of SSD, then take a wiser decision of switching to newer operating system. Operating systems like Windows Vista or XP are not capable of sending TRIM command to the hard drive, which means that your files will not be permanently erased upon deletion.
Also, while writing new files to solid-state drive, the sector has to be erased of the previously deleted files and write files on it, which takes more time.
Along with the knowledge of what shouldn’t be done with a solid-state drive, you must have become quite familiar with SSDs.
Robert R. is an avid guest blogger who writes on behalf of My Tech Gurus. He enjoys sharing his knowledge with the everyday computer user, by helping them with common errors, especially Windows installer errors and slow computer problems. Check out his articles at the Mytechgurus blog.