You Probably Don’t Need to Optimize Your SSD Anymore

When solid state drives first became common, most sites ( including our own ) offered ways to optimize your SSD. Except in very rare cases, this is no longer necessary.

As the How-To Geek site points out, most SSD optimizations are about reducing the number of writes you make to your drive. SSDs have a limited number of writes, so the more you use them, the more likely it is to fail. However, most modern SSDs have such high write capacities that you will most likely never reach that point until you need an upgrade anyway. As Tech Report writes after an 18-month stress test :

Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen modern solid state drives easily write much more data than most consumers might need. Errors occurred in the Samsung 840 Series only after 300 TB of recordings, and it took over 700 TB for the first failures to occur. The fact that the 840 Pro surpassed 2.4 PB is nothing short of astonishing, even if that achievement is academic as well.

The only optimization that really matters, enabling TRIM, is also automatically performed on most modern Windows versions. If you are using Windows 7 or newer, the OS should automatically detect your SSD and enable TRIM. If you want to be absolutely sure, you can check out our guide here . However, it is unlikely that this will not be included. If you are using an SSD on something earlier than Windows 7, TRIM is not supported and you should probably upgrade anyway. In short, most of the downsides to using an SSD are not as dire as they used to be, and you don’t need to worry if you’ve never “optimized” your drive. This is already pretty optimal. More information can be found in the How-To Geek post below.

Don’t Waste Time Optimizing Your SSD, Windows Knows What It Does | How-To Geek

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