Will reformatting an ssd wreck it overtime?

[JCP]

Hey guys,

So i'm thinking of buying an ssd for projects such as putting it into old pc's from 2003-2009 and some more recent but my question is:

Will constantly reformatting whenever i put it into a new machine destroy/wreck it over time?

 

Thanks

[Spotty]

5 minutes ago, Jacobtechtips? said:

Will constantly reformatting whenever i put it into a new machine destroy/wreck it over time?

No... Reformatting doesn't really do a whole lot to a drive. The data pretty much stays untouched, the drive/OS just no longer knows where to access it when it is reformatted and thinks the drive is empty. It just writes new data over the top of the old data.

If on the other hand you were regularly doing secure erases of the drive (going through and rewriting every bit of data, possibly multiple times) in order to actually remove the data from the drive, then it will add a lot of unnecessary writes to the drive which may decrease its lifetime.

[JCP]

ok then, so it may decrease its life span but it should still last quite a while right?

4 minutes ago, Spotty said:

No... Reformatting doesn't really do a whole lot to a drive. The data pretty much stays untouched, the drive/OS just no longer knows where to access it when it is reformatted and thinks the drive is empty. It just writes new data over the top of the old data.

If on the other hand you were regularly doing secure erases of the drive (going through and rewriting every bit of data, possibly multiple times) in order to actually remove the data from the drive, then it will add a lot of unnecessary writes to the drive which may decrease its lifetime.

 

[.Apex.]

15 minutes ago, Jacobtechtips? said:

Hey guys,

So i'm thinking of buying an ssd for projects such as putting it into old pc's from 2003-2009 and some more recent but my question is:

Will constantly reformatting whenever i put it into a new machine destroy/wreck it over time?

 

Thanks

Quick formatting doesn't do anything to the SSD, it just tells it to pretend that there's no data, so when you copy something onto it you're just overwriting data that you had before.

 

but the problem here is that if you wanna keep installing Windows over and over again you're just adding unnecessary writes to the drive and they have an expected life span depending on how much you write to it, for example 300TB writes, 500TB writes etc.

[Spotty]

4 minutes ago, Jacobtechtips? said:

ok then, so it may decrease its life span but it should still last quite a while right?

 

It should be fine. Installing windows again is really only going to add 50GB or so in writes to the drive, not a huge deal. People using SSDs for 4k video editing are going to be doing a lot more writes than that and a lot more frequently as well.

Why reinstall windows for each system though? You can install windows on to the SSD from one machine, and then just move the SSD to another machine and boot straight in to windows again without needing to reinstall. (The constant hardware swaps might expire your windows license... Though this will happen regardless of if you are installing fresh copies or just plugging the drive in across multiple PCs)

[.Apex.]

You can do some calculations yourself, let's say you wanna install Windows 50 times a year, and windows is about 20~GB (not really), so 50*20=1000GB, that's only 1TB.

[Enderman]

45 minutes ago, Jacobtechtips? said:

ok then, so it may decrease its life span but it should still last quite a while right?

 

Longer than you will live.

[DesolationGod]

youll buy a new ssd long before it dies... if it dies due to rewriting you just got a defective drive.

[JCP]

OK thx guys