Is a former internal SSD over a SATA adapter being recognized as HDD anything to worry about?

2

On Windows 10 (latest major update), my LITE-ON SSD of my previous laptop (both Lenovo) is being recognized as a HDD over a SATA adapter (according to dfrgui.exe). As far as I know, SSD use a different space allocation method to reduce wear.

schuelermine

Posted 2019-09-09T16:56:05.073

Reputation: 223

Is this SSD connected to a USB port through a USB-SATA adapter? If so, try a different adapter, and make sure you are connected to the best USB socket available (Red (3.1) is better than Blue (3.0) which is better than Black or Yellow (2.0) or White (1.x)) Yellow sockets are sleep-and-charge 2.0 ports. If USB is not involved, what is that drive connected to? Please click [edit] and fill us in with this info we need to help you. – K7AAY – 2019-09-09T21:22:14.307

Answers

3

SSD use a different space allocation method to reduce wear

Yes, but for PC SSDs this is invisible to the OS (nor even to the SATA HBA). The OS still writes to the disk in the same way as before, it's actually the disk's firmware which implements an additional allocation method to distribute writes evenly across flash memory. The computer still thinks it's writing to the exact same sectors as it's used to.

As far as I know, the only issue is if the OS decides to run scheduled "defragmentation", which would make sense for HDDs but is completely useless for SSDs, only producing a large amount of unnecessary flash writes. I don't recall Windows ever scheduling defrag for removable HDDs, but it might be worth checking the schedule in 'dfrgui' anyway.

Note: For disks correctly recognized as SSDs, dfrgui also has an "optimization" task but that is not defragmenting and you do not need to disable it – it sends TRIM / UNMAP commands to inform the SSD firmware which areas are considered "free" by NTFS. (Not doing this may result in decreased write speeds after a while, but isn't outright harmful.)

being destroyed every second I have it via the adapter

Wear only happens when the disk is being actively written to.

user1686

Posted 2019-09-09T16:56:05.073

Reputation: 283 655