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WinXP trashing SSDs

I have repeatedly found that SSDs get trashed by winXP, in desktops.

Nearly all retrofitted SSDs end up corrupted after about a year or two, in machines running 24/7.

Doing some digging turns up suprising results. It is a fact that out of the box XP (and previous windoze versions back to NT4) write to the registry about once per second. I spent a lot of time on this years ago, on a project where we wanted to shut down a SCSI HD, if there was no machine activity. I found it possible for D: and higher drives but totally impossible for C: (the boot drive).

And SSDs have a write limit per block, which with the automatic remapping of blocks which reached the limit means that an SSD of a given total size will accept a given amount of write data before it is all trashed. For say a 50GB SSD the total which can be written to it is of the order of 30 terabytes. This seems a lot and is a lot for normal human usage, but if you have some stupid code which is writing say 100k every second…

Yet, laptops shipped with XP obviously do disable these stupid writes otherwise their power management (e.g. HD shutdown after 30 mins) would never work. So presumably the OEM versions of XP, and perhaps OEM versions of win7 too, are different in some way to the retail XP DVD.

I have XP on two laptops and a tablet which admittedly don’t get run anywhere near 24/7 and they have been OK for several years. But all these came with XP preinstalled.

I now have a need to put XP onto a new laptop (probably a Thinkpad X230, which comes with win7 only) and wonder if anybody knows how to disable this stupid SSD-trashing feature… I do want an SSD in there because it might be used in the cockpit, and normal HDs very reliably crash around FL135 (not kidding – that was IIRC the Samsung figure). An SSD is also much faster for random reads i.e. booting and app loading.

Why XP, you may ask? A complicated reason, to do with specific apps which don’t work under win7.

The VM solution is messy in other respects, like COM port emulation. Also I am not convinced that retail XP running under a VM would not simply trash the SSD via the VM anyway…

Last Edited by Peter at 29 Nov 22:40
Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

No SSD expert, but perhaps the lack of TRIM-support in XP adds to the problem?

That is indeed possible, but what I’ve read about the TRIM command (not supported in winXP and early versions (or early SATA device drivers) in win7) is that it’s non-support results in a very slow running computer, due to the SSD running very slowly.

I have never seen that.

What I nearly always got was a non-booting computer, due to a vital root directory file like NTLDR going missing or corrupted.

I think we had about four SSDs pack up… different brands. Some Intel, some others.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
3 Posts
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