Couple of SSD queries.

[Glebe]

So my old Lenovo laptop finally crapped out awhile ago and I got myself a nice 14" Acer Aspire 5 with 256 SSD. This is the first solid state drive I've used, and doing a bit of Google research I've discovered stuff I hadn't a clue about, like you don't defrag an SSD (it can actually harm it) and that constantly cleaning/deleting can also reduce it's capacity. The other thing is antivirus protection... from the information I've gleaned, apparently antivirus software is not essential for an SSD and can just slow it down or summit? I'm very confused and just can't seem to find proper advice about this. I was gonna renew my old Bitdefender subscription for this laptop until I read up on this... the Norton trial that came with the Acer has run out and I'm just using Windows Defender now - is that enough?

So here's my basic coupla questions:

1. Should I avoid doing clean-up with the computer? Like even clearing browser cache (no porn jokes please) and deleting small files?

2. What kind of virus protection should I use for it, if any?

Cheers in advance!

[Zetetic]

Don't use third-party antivirus. Nothing to do with SSDs, just don't. Leave Microsoft Defender on.

Don't worry about deleting stuff, clearing caches. But I've no idea why you're doing the latter, so stop that unless you've got a good reason.

[Glebe]

Thanks for the advice Zetetic. I'm just a bit OCD about things in general - including PC housekeeping!

[Zetetic]

No worries, and apologies for my terseness.

This sort of stuff is not helped by "good practice" changing without much clarity, I appreciate. Manual defragging is a good example!

[Glebe]

No prob Z. I'm really surprized at the paucity of information about taking care of a solid state there seems to be online.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I've done nothing diffferent with SSD's. They are limited by write operations but for a laptop it'll fall apart long before that's an issue.

AFAIK running defrag has been of limited use on machines with spinning disks as Windows has done it in the background for the past few versions anyway (it knows not to on ssd's).

[Zetetic]

Yeah, since 7.

[PlanktonSideburns]

So I don't need antivirus? Lookin forward to deleting that little pick in the morning

[earl_sleek]

Antivirus software can use similar tricks to malware in order to access your system thoroughly enough to do its job, which can in itself led to vulnerabilities. Windows Defender doesn't have that issue because it's part of Windows, and is good enough that there's not really any point paying for antivirus software if you're just a home user.

[Mister Six]

How does defragging damage an SSD? Aren't you just shunting data around a bit, much as you would do for any other operation on the computer?

And why would deleting files reduce capacity?

Was going to defeat my PS4 but now concerned for my SSD drive.

[Consignia]

SSDs have limited lives, limited by the number times it's written too. So it's a good idea to avoid unnecessary writes. Defragging is a particularly intensive operation, being particularly pointless because they don't have the seek times spinning discs have.

I wouldn't worry about deleting stuff off your Playstation, your not going to be doing often enough to make a long term life reducing effect. Just perhaps don't do it everyday.

[Sebastian Cobb]

SSDs have limited lives, limited by the number times it's written too. So it's a good idea to avoid unnecessary writes. Defragging is a particularly intensive operation, being particularly pointless because they don't have the seek times spinning discs have.

To add to this the drives include 'wear levelling' so internally try to write to each bit a similar number of times, so under the hood, it doesn't matter how you've arranged the data, the drive has actually fragmented it behind the scenes anyway.

'Deleting things' will likely make no difference,  given most filesystems don't actually zero the data, they'll just mark more portions of the drive as unreserved. With things like caches, it will cause more wear since it has to fill it back up again, but even then, I wouldn't consider it 'very bad' just unnecessary.

[Hand Solo]

https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-bug-wrecking-ssd/

[Consignia]

'Deleting things' will likely make no difference,  given most filesystems don't actually zero the data, they'll just mark more portions of the drive as unreserved. With things like caches, it will cause more wear since it has to fill it back up again, but even then, I wouldn't consider it 'very bad' just unnecessary.

In the case of a console, you are likely to be operating at near capacity and deleting something with the view putting something on it again in reasonably short time. So I see a delete on console is a write as well. But even then unless you are constantly cycling the disc every day, it's unlikely to make a huge difference.

[Glebe]

Thanks again for the advice folks!