In Part 1 of this 2-part series on how to extend the life of your SSD hard drive, we discussed the issue of write amplification and how it negatively affects flash memory and SSD performance.
The basic explanation of how to extend the life of your solid state drive is to reduce writes to it. Your SSD’s flash memory must be erased before it is written to, so the multiple writes required for a single write “amplify” the effect of your attempted write. This wear on the drive reduces the lifespan of your SSD plus it decreases random write performance.
As discussed in Part 1, the first way to combat this is through a process designed specifically to improve SSD performance by consolidating fragmented free space, resulting in more efficient TRIM operations, subsequently reducing write amplification. But there is another way to accomplish reduced writes to your SSD.
The 2nd Way to Combat SSD Write Amplification
If the goal if to reduce writes to your SSD, in some cases, why not avoid writing to your SSD at all?
Random Access Memory is inherently faster than an electromechanical physical drive. Using a RAM disk on a traditional hard drive speeds up random reads and writes up to 50 times faster than a traditional drive would allow. Because an SSD uses flash memory and is already faster than traditional disk drives, the speed of reading data is not an issue for SSDs, but using the RAM disk on a solid state drive would serve these two significant purposes:- Reducing writes to the SSD
- Improving random write performance
With RamDisk Plus, you can create multiple high-speed RAM disks to be used as caches to store data. Creating a RAM disk and setting common PC activities to write to that disk eliminates unnecessary writing to your SSD. Some options that would eliminate writing to the SSD include:
- Pointing TEMP files to the RAM disk
- Setting your web browser cache to your RAM disk
- Placing the pagefile on the RAM disk
Follow these instructions on configuring RAM disks with RamDisk Plus or download a free trial and get the instructions in your inbox!
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