How does formating affect my SSD?

[egil87]

How many times can I format before I would start noticing a degrading perfomance from my SSD? I have enabled both TRIM and AHCI, and always format using the windows 7 installer. (quick format) I have formated 5 times total, should I be worried about it starting to take a toll?

 

[nordlead]

if all you do is format, you can do it thousands of times.

What really matters is how many times you write to the flash cells. A quick format only writes to a small portion of the disk to create a new filesystem. All the old data would still technically be there (on a magnetic disk anyways). I would imagine that behavior is slightly different on a SSD since the garbage collector would erase everything off of the HDD so future writing would be fast.

EDIT: even then, you have more than enough write endurance that you shouldn't have to worry about it at all unless you are creating data as fast as the SSD can write it 24hr/day. If you have 10k write cycles before the drive fails, and you have a 64GB SSD, then you could (ignoring write amplification) write 640TB to the drive before you should expect the drive to fail because of flash fatigue.

 

[egil87]

Ah, I see. That is very comforting to know. I have reformated 5 times the last week... But most of the time I did not install much data, perhaps 15 gigs at most.(some games and such) I shall treat it with dignity now that it is finally perfect.