What do our computer gurus on FR advise?
“Unallocated” (above). Heheh.
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.
Install MiniTool Partition Wizard. I have used this.
https://www.partitionwizard.com
Should be easy to merge the unallocated partition to where you want. The other question about TRIM I cannot answer.
Googled: will “TRIM” etc. spread the wear out over the entire drive, including the unallocated partition
https://tinyurl.com/2p9pdjew
What is trim and active garbage collection?
https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/what-is-trim
Download and install the Samsung Magician software. You can allocate TRIM space at the end of the drive. Plus the memory caching will speed things up.
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,
CO
The same thing occurred to me. But I’m shifting to a new laptop and the HD will be wiped/pulled because the old laptop is essentially garbage.
Sorry: I won’t be solving my puzzle, but it seems we made the same error.
The recovery partition at the end is preventing you from expanding the drive. You need to move it to the end. Technically you only need it if something goes wrong. You can delete that partition and then you can resize the Windows partition to use the entire drive.
Format the unallocated space and save your system image to it