I have my SSD partitioned into C:, 150 gb, and D:, 100 gb, and F:, 200 gb. Neither D nor F get used nearly as much as C (obviously), and, in fact, D: is BitLocker encrypted, and I don't even always decrypt it. (Anything that needs to be saved goes into "Downloads," which I periodically clean out.)
It seems like the part of the SSD that has C: on it should have several times as much wear as the rest of the drive, yet the "health" of all the drives is for the entire drive, not the partitions. Is my drive less "healthy" than I think?
Would this mess up the wear algorithm?
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hdsentinel
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Re: Would this mess up the wear algorithm?
No, I can confirm that this does not cause troubles and does not affect the health of the drive or a part of the drive.
The first partition is not "less" healthy as others.
SSDs have a "wear leveling" function. As you may know, all memory cells of a flash storage can be re-written only limited times, so even if you attempt to ALWAYS write to a particular sector, the SSD automatically writes the data to different memory cells. This way ideally each cells will have similar wear level.
So even if you have a C: partition with intensive use (lots of writes) it does not mean that only that part of the SSD receives higher wear: the wear leveling attempts to write data in all memory cells.
This is why generally only the health of the complete device is important as it determines the real wearout of all memory cells.
In contrast, simple memory cards usually have no such wear level function, they always re-program the same memory cell when the corresponding sector is written. This causes that memory cards may become corrupted relatively sooner when they need to update lots of data (usually in the administrative area, the file system descriptors and so). Installing an OS (for example) on a such SD card usually kills the card in relatively short time.
The first partition is not "less" healthy as others.
SSDs have a "wear leveling" function. As you may know, all memory cells of a flash storage can be re-written only limited times, so even if you attempt to ALWAYS write to a particular sector, the SSD automatically writes the data to different memory cells. This way ideally each cells will have similar wear level.
So even if you have a C: partition with intensive use (lots of writes) it does not mean that only that part of the SSD receives higher wear: the wear leveling attempts to write data in all memory cells.
This is why generally only the health of the complete device is important as it determines the real wearout of all memory cells.
In contrast, simple memory cards usually have no such wear level function, they always re-program the same memory cell when the corresponding sector is written. This causes that memory cards may become corrupted relatively sooner when they need to update lots of data (usually in the administrative area, the file system descriptors and so). Installing an OS (for example) on a such SD card usually kills the card in relatively short time.