PStepanas wrote:

What I know is that SSDs are write-limited

SSD with normal use will out live several PCs replacements (by that time your will replace HDDs x100 times) so you have nothing to worry about nor take any special steps to “prolong its life”.
You can write swap, hib, sleep files on the SSD without a worry.

The life span of a Samsung 850 PRO with 1TB then results in:

https://www.compuram.de/blog/en/the-life-span-of-a-ssd-how-long-does-it-last-and-what-can-be-done-to-take-care/

SSD’s may outlive an HDD but they will slow down eventually if they are not cleaned up with a “Trim” program.  I think Windows 10 has Trim, maybe you could find one for Win 7.

I put a Samsung 250 GB 860 EVO SSD in my old Sony laptop that I have Linux Mint installed on, and linux has FSTrim that I use about every two weeks or so.

I bought a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD for my desktop PC 5.5 years ago, just upgraded to Windows 7 at the time.  I’ve never taken it easy on the drive… I’ve had my swap/page file on there since the beginning, and in those days I used to hit that page file very hard.  It was during the worst part of Firefox’s memory leaking days, and I tend to have tons of tabs open.  The speed of the SSD masked the immediate slowdown that let me know it was time to restart Firefox, so it would just continue to pound away at the SSD.  When I later checked it with Sysinternals’ RamMap, I saw that the system was having to repurpose (page out) into the top few priority categories, which is generally a sign that the RAM installed is way too small for the task at hand.

I did buy more RAM for that PC, but the nature of memory leaks is that they just keep going, using up more and more memory, until something happens to stop it.  It delayed the memory crisis, but the page file still got hit hard from time to time.

That SSD was the home to Windows (7 first, then 10 to be able to give it a fair tryout on my own well-known hardware, then back to 7, then 8.1, and now to Linux), and I’ve moved all kinds of stuff on and off that drive.  I’ve restored from backups more times than I can remember (all part of a normal computing day for me).

I think it is fair to say that I have tortured that little SSD more than the vast majority of home users would.  And now, after 5.5 years, the drive reports that it still has 68 percent of its rated service life remaining.  But even when it reaches zero rated life remaining, it’s not the end… TechRepublic did a series of tests on SSDs, doing continuous writes on them until they died, and the 840 Pro was only halfway to its own death when it ran out of rated life.  At the very least, I have 11 more years of life left… but in reality it will be more, since Firefox (upon which Waterfox is based) has improved greatly, and most days Linux doesn’t even touch the swap file.

The 840 I have is a pro series SSD, and the pro series from Samsung have longer lives than the Evos of the same generation (840 in this case), but each new generation increases the life of Evo and Pro alike.  I think I read somewhere that the NAND cells in my 850 Evo (now in my Dell G3 laptop) have a similar write-cycle rating as those in my my 840 Pro, and the 860 Evo in my Acer Swift is even better than the 850.

On top of that, my 850 and 860 are both 1TB models, which increases their nominal service life 8 times compared to the 128GB 840 Pro.  There are two ways to improve the nominal service life of a SSD… increase the number of write cycles each NAND cell can tolerate before dying, or increase the number of NAND cells and spread the workload out so each cell gets fewer writes.

The price I paid for my 128GB 840 Pro back then would now get you a 860 Evo 1TB, and it would have a significantly longer life than my 840 Pro… which is only a third done into its 16.5 year long rated life!

I would definitely suggest that you do put the swap file on the SSD, as the SSD is far faster, and you want the most speed you can get for that.

As for TRIM– my Windows 7 did this by itself after each write.  I did the TRIM test (a small command line utility) where the program writes a bunch of data to a given logical sector of the drive, then deletes it, and when you run it again, it attempts to read the data.  If the deleted data is still there, TRIM did not take place, as the purpose of TRIM is to finalize deletions and free up the NAND blocks.  If the data is gone, TRIM took place.

In each case that I tried it, the data was gone on my Win 7 system.  I only ran the test, waited a minute, then ran it again, but it had trimmed during that time.

Ascaris: ” And now, after 5.5 years, the drive reports that it still has 68 percent of its rated service life remaining.”

This sounds like something useful to know. How does one interrogate an SSD to get that information?

I have a Crucial 250GB SSD from the days of Vista, Windows 7 & upgraded to Windows 10 and it still runs as good as new. I make sure the Optimization feature automatically to stay on schedule (in my case monthly by now) and use Crucial’s Storage Executive once a year during the month of August to ensure the “status” of the SSD to operate as it should.
I have to admit I’m not as adept on how many of you can do with the set-ups you do as I’m a simple average user but that reminds me that the information in these posts are so valuable.

Charlie wrote:

SSD’s may outlive an HDD but they will slow down eventually if they are not cleaned up with a “Trim” program.  I think Windows 10 has Trim, maybe you could find one for Win 7.

I put a Samsung 250 GB 860 EVO SSD in my old Sony laptop that I have Linux Mint installed on, and linux has FSTrim that I use about every two weeks or so.

Windows 10 has automatic TRIM on, and you can set TRIM on Windows 7.

OscarCP wrote:

Ascaris: ” And now, after 5.5 years, the drive reports that it still has 68 percent of its rated service life remaining.”

This sounds like something useful to know. How does one interrogate an SSD to get that information?

Use CrystalDiskInfo.

A good backup system is a must I believe you have one from another post. I would not wory too much with a good backup in place, but as SSDs are cheap these days dedicating one to swap file usage is not unreasonable. If your computer needs and uses a swapfile having it on an SSD would be the way to go. As SSDs seem to die w/o as much warning as HDDs using a HDD as a data drive would be what I would do, unless you do data intensive operations.

PS Just putting one together myself but a little stalled :[

Use the SSD anywhere you want speed. OS, swap, video editing etc.
To save space put static data on an HDD. Old videos, music etc.

SSD Life article.

cheers, Paul