WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Check the health of your SSD and reveal its estimated lifespan
• Reduce the time it takes to save files to your SSD
• Free up space on your drive to boost its performance
• Force Windows to allocate maximum power to your SSD
• Disable unnecessary features that slow your drive
• Ensure your PC is configured to boot from your SSD
• Benchmark-test your drive to monitor its speed over time
Solid-state drives (SSDs) have revolutionised our computers over the past decade, making them faster, quieter and much more reliable. If you’ve bought a new laptop or desktop PC in the last few years, it almost certainly includes an SSD, either as its sole boot and storage drive, or coupled with a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) to give you extra space.
The quality and popularity of SSDs means that HDDs are being phased out. Last year, we reported that Microsoft had asked PC manufacturers to prioritise SSDs over hard drives (see Issue 634, page 10), despite the latter being cheaper to make and buy. But although the latest SSDs are up to a hundred times faster than HDDs, they’re not immune to performance problems, whether the drive is built into your PC or you’ve installed it yourself.
There are many factors that can affect the speed of your solid-state drive, including incorrectly configured settings, compatibility issues and even Windows updates. Only last month, some Windows 11 users who installed the KB5023706 update experienced a massive drop in the speed of their SSDs (see www.snipca.com/45500).
In this feature, we reveal how to boost the performance of your SSD by tweaking secret settings and running dedicated software. All our advice is free to try and will help your drive achieve and maintain its optimum speed.
IS YOUR SSD ABOUT TO FAIL?
Why might your SSD be about to die?
Although solid-state drives have no moving parts, which makes them faster, quieter and less prone to mechanical malfunctions than traditional hard drives, they only support a limited number of writes. This is because they use flash memory to store data rather than physical RAM, which is organised into blocks.
When data is written to unused memory on your SSD, it is locked and protected, and can’t be overwritten until it’s erased using an electrical charge. To update the data in a block, your SSD must copy its entire contents - including the new data – to an empty block, and then delete the original block – a process called ‘garbage collection’. This means that SSDs need to perform complex operations each time they write data, which causes them to gradually wear out.
Once your drive exceeds its maximum number of
