I've just purchased an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD drive and I'm trying to understand how various pieces of software could impact it. I'm going to be running Windows 7 on it.

My current choice of antivirus software is ESET NOD32. How will this impact the performance and life of my SSD? Should I disable realtime scanning, or should I leave it on? Are there any differences between different types of A/V software? My current thinking is that A/V won't make much difference because it is mainly performing reads, but I'm interested in what feedback people have.


Antivirus will have very little impact on your SSD.

Removing data from SSDs can leave what is technically known as 'garbage'. Before an SSD writes data to a page, it must clear up any garbage on that page. The more deletes you do, the more garbage there will be, and the more time will be spent garbage collecting. Garbage is completely virtual however, meaning it's easily repairable by either blanking the SSD or by using TRIM (a command supported by Windows 7).

To sum up; it's deleting data you have to worry about, but it's not such a big deal anyway.


Be careful about writes, that is the main thing. So it is those backup and syncing software I would watch out for.