SSD disks are certainly faster than their HDD counterparts, because they do not have any moving mechanical parts in them. The data read and write rate in SSD disks is comparable to your RAM memory and this is why using a SSD disk in Windows PC makes the whole PC faster and quick to respond. But when it comes to the durability, HDD disks win the battle over SSD disks. SSD disks have a limited number of read/write cycles and once you have crossed the limit it would simply stop to work. Most of the SSD disks generally last only for a maximum of 4 to 5 years. But using a free software called SSD Fresh, you can optimize Windows settings to make them last longer.
SSD Fresh is a free software from Abelssoft softwares. It makes changes in Windows to reduce the number of reads and writes to your SSD disks. If your operating system is not writing that much to the disk, then obviously your disk is going to last longer.
You can download SSD Fresh from the Abelssoft software website. The download is available as a setup installer for Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8. It is designed in .NET 4.0, so you should install the Microsoft .NET framework version 4.0 prior to running this application. When you launch SSD Fresh for the first time, it asks to be activated. The activation is free and involves supplying your name and email address.
The main window of SSD Fresh displays all of your disk drives by their letter names. You can select any one of them and it would display more information about that drive e.g., hard disk size, drive size, filesystem type, manufacturer name, disk space (free and used) etc. You can also click on the S.M.A.R.T data button to view the S.M.A.R.T date for the selected hard disk.
Under the Optimization section, you would find all the different types of optimizations available for the SSD disks. Some of the optimizations available are – disabling file access timestamps, disabling search indexing, disabling defragmenting of files, disabling defragmenting of boot files, disable prefetch, disable system restore and more.
You can choose to enable or disable all the different kinds of optimizations. But if you do not want to go through each one of them, then you can let SSD Fresh handle everything automatically by clicking on the Optimize all settings button on the top.
The SSD Fresh is a free and easy to use software for reducing the number of disk writes and increasing your SSD disk life. It optimizes Windows in such a way to make the SSD last longer than usual. But it should be used carefully, as disabling services like System Restore can prevent you from restoring your system in case of malware attacks or unwanted file changes.
You can download SSD Fresh from http://www.abelssoft.net/apps/ssd-fresh/