By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – June 10, 2010 at 11:00AM
We’ve seen the speed benefits of Solid State Drives (SSDs), but they also have the downside of a more limited number of writes. Technology blog Ghacks shows us how to increase an SSD’s longevity by moving oft-written caches to a RAM disk.
Photo by Yusuke Kawasaki.
The constant writing and erasing of caches and other temporary folders on your computer will wear out your SSD faster, so one way to get as much life out of your SSD as possible is to move these folders somewhere else. If you have a regular hard drive installed alongside your SSD, you can move those caches to the magnetic drive, but if your computer is only running on an SSD drive or drives, you’ll have to be a bit more creative.
Ghacks has put together a guide to not only moving these caches (for anyone interested in doing so), but shows you how to turn some of your RAM into a storage device called a RAM disk. If you have a good amount of RAM in your system (around 3 or 4 GB should be fine), you can save your caches there instead, thus saving your SSD the constant writes and erasures. Hit the link for the full guide, and share your SSD optimization tips in the comments.