Just bought an SSD

[Soukyuu]

They seem to be doing alot better with their Octane and Vertex 4 model drives, but I would be VERY weary of their budget SSDs.

I had a budget SSD from them... the Onyx. Sent it back after a day because it was SLOWER than my HDD.

I'm not really complaining about the shorter life span, I was merely pointing it out as a con. I personally don't like the the SSD lifespan being based on writes, but Looking at HDDs, they both have a similar life cycle. I think for HDD after so many years, each following year has Double the chance of the drive failing. Overall if you're not constantly writing data to a SSD, it should last just as long as a HDD. Remember all technology has an expiry, even if it's not mentioned.

I actually like SSDs for having a relatively set expiration date. I'd rather know I'm getting closer to the edge and will have to replace it soon than having to fear that it can fail at any time (I'm looking at you, HDDs).

And from what I remember, you'd have to constantly write to the SSD for 5 years to wear it out. Nobody writes that much to an SSD. And with recent controllers, the amount of writes per sector is minimized, so even if you use your SSD for everything, it will last much longer than those 5 years. And looking at space requirements rising all the time, you will have to replace it sooner or later anyway.

A few small tips: Your SSD may come with software that can reconfigure key Windows settings for you, but if not-

Win7 and newer will automatically detect an SSD on install and disable defrag and prefetch. Cloning a HDD partition to SSD is not advisable, as special alignment of sectors are needed when partitioning to different types of drives.

Set your swap file (aka virtual memory) to a fixed size so that it isn't constantly being resized by Windows, again increasing strain on the drive.

That doesn't change anything actually. The only direction windows will resize the pagefile is up (not down), setting it to a fixed size will just waste space. With 4+GB of RAM, you will only need the pagefile for some weird programs who need the pagefile to work anyway.

Disable the indexing service (which speeds up file searches). With the speed of an SSD it's not really necessary and again increases strain on the drive.

Indexing doesn't increase the strain on the drive as it is read only (not counting the database creation). And if you have a HDD in addition to the SSD, you will need the indexing service. If you're really paranoid about drive wear, then you can move the indexing database to your HDD in Indexing options -> advanced.

Another thing you can do is move the tmp folders in advanced system properties -> advanced -> einvironment variables.