Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2022 May 28

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May 28

Question about SSD wear-leveling

Dear Wikipedians:

My SSD holds mostly big movie files that are not written to, but only read from. The files that change most often are Word and PowerPoint files that I work with on a day-to-day basis as part of my job. Would my SSD be smart enough, from a wear-leveling perspective, to know to write these Word and PowerPoint files to the SSD cells occupied by the big movie files, so that wear-leveling can be evenly distributed to ALL cells in the SSD, and not just those cells in the SSD marked as "free space"?

172.97.199.147 (talk) 22:43, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes any decent modern SSD will move what's on cells around as needed to ensure wear is fairly evenly distributed. Note that besides wear leveling reasons, SSDs need to check and potentially refresh used cells which haven't been written to in a while. (While like a lot of things with SSDs, there's a lot of misinformation, there is some risk if you leave an SSD unpowered for many months or even years, the data may no longer be completely readable.) IMO with modern SSDs and with TRIM enabled, it's unlikely the average consumer needs to worry about wear. The only things you might want to do are ensure that you leave a decent amount of free space and not do completely stupid things like try to optimise an SSD (other than whatever a modern OS which understands SSDs may choose to do). Nil Einne (talk) 09:04, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your excellent answer. I am reassured now. 172.97.199.147 (talk) 23:04, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

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