SSD Maintenance Guide?

Good Evening (or Night, Morning, or Afternoon as appropriate for international users :P),

I was wondering if there was any sort of guide here for maintaining and prolonging the life of SSD drives. Being an owner of a Dell Mini 9, that's pretty important to me since it uses SSD as the main storage device.

I know not to defragment it, but past that, I am unsure of what seemingly normal activities might actually be sapping the life out of it. For example, I don't know if system scans might drain it somehow (antivirus, antimalware, etc.), or if I should try to have a pagefile on another drive, if that's even possible with an external drive (for example, I'm currently using a SDHC card for ReadyBoost; could I move the pagefile there, etc.)

Any suggestions would be well appreciated!

--Red

If your SSD has TRIM support great, if not, performance will eventually degrade as the cells in the SSD are not being properly cleared. So you may run wiper.exe to fix the issue. I would check with Dell what SSD this is.

If it is an Intel, this may be useful. Some more interesting facts here. And here is a Tweak Utility.

The SSD is an STEC PATA 16GB SSD. From what I can tell, it's Flash-based. How can I tell if it has TRIM support?

Open an elevated Command Prompt (run as admin) and paste this command into the Command Prompt window:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If Command Prompt returns a 0 (zero), your drive supports TRIM and it is enabled.
If it returns 1 (one), the file system has disabled TRIM for your drive. This means your drive's controller does not support TRIM.

WHS, I registered just to thank you for your posts ITT. Gracias

I also joined to say thanks WHS, that helped me as well.