Windows Partition(s) question (new SSD)

I just increased the SSD in the desktop computer soon to be my primary machine to a 1 TB SSD. All went smoothly, except that Macrium Reflect* left me with the following for "Disk 0":

2nd Partition = HP6300-I5-2-new.SSD-2 222.64 GB NTFS (Healthy) (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

Once I free it up off another machine, Windows Update downloads will go onto a modestly used 120 GB Sandisk SSD.

Now, the whole reason I put a 1 TB Samsung MLC SSD with a 5 year warranty and ungodly rewrite capability in this machine is to maximize the boot drive's life and reliability. I really can't forsee ever exceeding the 222+ GB capacity of the primary partition, for the OS and various programs. BUT, that unallocated partition was unintended.*

As the drive ages, will "TRIM" etc. spread the wear out over the entire drive, including the unallocated partition, or, will "C" see almost all of the wear, leaving the unallocate portion of the drive not contributing to its life?

If the latter, I need to redo the clone of the old SSD, or use some disk management tool (or Power Shell - carefully!) to allocate the bulk of the drive to "C:".

**As is probably obvious, I have a LITTLE computer knowledge -- enough to get by, about 60% of the time, and enough to get me into trouble 40% of the time. ;-)

Unless you are running large databases with large constant writes eight hours a day, you are in fine shape.

These drives have gotten a lot longer lasting, and performance degradation is minor with ordinary usage. On all but the cheapest (or largest per volume) data arrays they are really taking over for platters in data centers, despite the fact that a lot of data center storage has the worst type of use for these things. When you have constant compression, bi-rectional encryption, and deduplication with multi-user access, that is pretty much a worst case scenario. Of course, those are redundant arrays and all that, but so is physical media.

Seriously, people from the beginning must have thought of battery memory in laptops or something, because paranoia about SSDs slowing to a crawl in a year was a thing from the beginning, and it was never really a major issue for most uses.

Hi, Minnesota_bound! That 2nd link answered my question:

(Scroll down to answer from "Jon" of Micron)

ANY UNUSED SPACE is used to manage garbage collection and wear leveling. It doesn't matter if it's unpartitioned space or if is it is simply unused within the partition.

(typo correction mine)

So, for all intents and purposes, I can leave it alone, and, if I ever use up the 222 GB of "C:", I can create another drive in the unallocated space to move a few apps (programs) into, esp. if such would do many writes to the folder or drive it is in.

For all practical purposes, this drive should easily outlive me. Maybe my daughter, too. Although, that begs another question:

Does reading data on a SSD or USB flash drive "refresh" it?

Dr. S - Thanks. As I just noted, Micron agrees with you.

Still...

Windows updates are getting beyond ridiculous. I'm constantly appalled by how much and how often machines, especially lesser ones with HDD's only, are tied up with update downloads, not even to mention the machine sometimes blue-screening for hours while the updates are installed and configured. That's a fair amount of data flying around. "Please wait..."

Aagghh.

And that's after trying to optimize the thing (machine(s) in question.)

https://www.techadvisory.org/2019/08/is-your-windows-10-update-slow-heres-what-to-do/

IMO, you are worrying too much about wear and tear. I would enlarge the OS partition with the unallocated space and go to sleep. Use the stuff you paid for. That will spread out reads and writes to a larger area. My SSD is 5+ years old and is fine.If you were using it as a server, you might look into making a RAM drive, but for normal use, just use it. Mine was a re-manufacture from the factory and cost $48 5 years ago.

Some things to look out for is make sure you do not automatically defrag all the time and use Trim. You must set it up with the OS with AHCI for the fastest speed. You can't change it after the OS is installed.

If you use it for a Plex server, transcoding should be done on a ramdrive. That is very read/write intense. Everything else is just normal wear and tear.

Let's just say you keep the 222 gig as your Boot drive and it starts getting errors. There is no guarantee you can format your empty space and use it for a boot drive. Boot sections can only go on certain sectors of the drive.

I have a similar setup after using Macrium Reflect to clone my Windows 10 system onto my SSD.

If you are worried about writes to the SSD and have already done the TRIM. Turn off Optimization of your C: drive. In the file manager, right click on the C: drive and select Properties. Click the Tools tab and select the Optimize Button, then unselect "Run from a Schedule" for C:

Optimization (Defragging) does a boat load of Writes to your C: drive reducing the life of your SSD. And because you have such small files (no video files etc.), you never need to optimize it ever again. The hard drive will still need the scheduled optimization as spares on it are SLOW. Spares on the SSD do not have this problem.

Next, I turned Windows Indexing OFF on my C: drive and Disabled Sysmain. You will wish you had turned off Indexing before cloning, but that is life as it may take an hour or more to turn it off. I would do this before going to bed and let it run overnight.

Imagine your SSD running all over the place Writing as it updates the Index pointer to the DIRECTORY OF ALL YOUR FILES ON THE C: drive. That's a lot of writes to the same place on the DIRECTORY OF ALL THE FILES. Ugh! Yeah, Optimization and Indexing together... Not good for SSDs and NVME drives at all.

Click the Magnifying glass and type Services and select the Button marked Services. I'm guessing you're on Windows 10 or 11, so find Sysmain (services are in alphabetical order). Right click on it and select STOP and then Right Click again and Properties and Disable it from staring up automatically again the next boot. I would do the same for Windows Search.

Again, in C: Properties, at the bottom is a Check Mark on "Allow... Indexing", uncheck this and start the process and click continue when it complains about some system files currently in use. As you have a Macrium Reflect backup in essence and no files will be damaged in the process, go to bed.

In the morning, get out of C: Properties and you have a system that does a ton of less writes that should last for a decade or more, no problem.

File manager may have a green bar when searching through the millions of files Windows has (Ugh). But this is better than wearing out the drive with Writes.

But me, I am a speed freak and I hate having any more writes than I have to on C: So, I would Macrium Reflect your changed system and google "Windows 10 Performance Speed" and do what that recommends. You should be very impressed with how snappy your system gets after this.

I followed this and every performance tweak I liked until in the Task Manager, Resource Monitor, Disk got down to about 3 lines (extremely low writes) after about 30 minutes.

Yeah, my system(s) are going to last pretty much forever or until Windows is Obsolete.

Note: On Windows 11 (really Windows 10 with Window Dressing) Windows can monitor SMART Drives and let you know when it is running over the manufactures write specs or low on spares.

Windows 10 was supposed to get this on 21H2 but I have not seen it there yet. It is in System, Storage, Advanced, Disks and Volumes in Windows 11.

Now the SSD and NVME manufacturers are not happy with me at all :( .< Boo Hoo!

Njoy,

But I’m shifting to a new laptop and the HD will be wiped/pulled because the old laptop is essentially garbage.

I would make sure that whatever you get is BIOS compatible with m.2 with full NVMe as a system disk. This is where things are going.

I went the other way and found a used Inspiron 3853 dual Core with a True NVME M.2 slot and a Hard Drive. But it didn't come with an NVME drive and learned the hard way that you have to install Windows from Scratch on an NVME drive pretty much. The bigger the NVME the better, I did a 1TB NMVE M.2. Why? Bigger windows write cache.

Am now experimenting with a NUC 6 (also used) that has two True NVME M.2 Slots. And I do a lot of video processing and copying, this should be truly awesome.

8GB two 4GB identical DIMMs for Dual Memory is the lowest I would go with windows 10 for performance. This is another key for the future as NVME M.2 is Dual Channel as well. Am expecting 1GB transfer in less than a second. Or about a super transfer rate. Theoretically it could go 16GB/Second NVME to NVME, but the target needs to be 1TB or larger.

I'm thinking some GPUs are gettin sone NVME transfers directly now. It should be awesome for Gamers.

Agreed. Windows update killed my brand new machine and took out all my checked out software licenses. It took two weeks to get it sorted since the software companies assume you are trying to pirate their software. Even after turning it off through third party and “hacking” means they did a forced upgrade with no warning or options to choose what was downloaded and installed. And the machine was stuck until I plugged it in to a router for internet. Not all of us have 24/7 internet.

As for the OP. Don’t bother with multiple partitions on a ssd. I have never used a third party partition software but it sounds like the one he is using wants to take too much control over the computer. If it were me.... I would install a second and mirror them if you are that worried about data loss.

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