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Will reading from a USB drive wear my SSD?

jasonstar3
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Does reading from a USB drive write to a computer's storage? I recently purchased a SSD for my laptop and an external hard drive to put movies on. If I watch movies from my external hard drive will data be temporarily stored on/written to my SSD and in turn wear it down? Thanks in advance!

 

 

Kind of. There will always be bits and pieces of a file transferred to your PC, depending on the programs you use... some programs create thumb nails in a temp folder... and while you could delete the temp folder manually, nothing is truly deleted until it gets written over with new information. The full file wont be transfered to your computer unless you save it or move/copy it to your computer. This isn't something you should be worried about, a typical person wont find this information... And as VirtualR3ality has pointed out, this small amounts of information wont do a thing to your SSD at all.

 

Rest assured, your wife will never come across your porn -- Sorry, I mean 'movies' -- on your computer if your external hard drive isn't plugged in.

 

 

 

Here is some information I found.

https://superuser.com/questions/176304/does-using-an-external-disk-drive-or-even-a-usb-key-leave-a-trace-on-a-compute

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Does reading from a USB drive write to a computer's storage? I recently purchased a SSD for my laptop and an external hard drive to put movies on. If I watch movies from my external hard drive will data be temporarily stored on/written to my SSD and in turn wear it down? Thanks in advance!

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It won't unless you choose to copy the data to the SSD. Otherwise you're just reading from the external HDD.

 

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Jason you really shouldn't worry about wearing out your SSD, if anything it will last just as long if not longer under normal loads then a mechanical HDD on a laptop.

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Modern SSDs last for decades in the hands of a normal user but before that you will swap them. Also reading from an external drive has nothing to do with your internal drive.

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  • Solution

Does reading from a USB drive write to a computer's storage? I recently purchased a SSD for my laptop and an external hard drive to put movies on. If I watch movies from my external hard drive will data be temporarily stored on/written to my SSD and in turn wear it down? Thanks in advance!

 

 

Kind of. There will always be bits and pieces of a file transferred to your PC, depending on the programs you use... some programs create thumb nails in a temp folder... and while you could delete the temp folder manually, nothing is truly deleted until it gets written over with new information. The full file wont be transfered to your computer unless you save it or move/copy it to your computer. This isn't something you should be worried about, a typical person wont find this information... And as VirtualR3ality has pointed out, this small amounts of information wont do a thing to your SSD at all.

 

Rest assured, your wife will never come across your porn -- Sorry, I mean 'movies' -- on your computer if your external hard drive isn't plugged in.

 

 

 

Here is some information I found.

https://superuser.com/questions/176304/does-using-an-external-disk-drive-or-even-a-usb-key-leave-a-trace-on-a-compute

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