Today I shared this advice with a programmer friend. I hope you find it useful. Firstly, you need to download and install
HD Tune. Version 2.55 is still available for free (for personal use), but I use the pro version ($34.95) because it gives me extra features, and it saved my laptop hard drive on several occasions when it started overheating.
This is a typical hard drive benchmark, where the outside of the drive is faster than the inside.
This is my SSD drive. The blue line should be flat, since a solid-state drive has no moving parts. Notice the "dips" where the drive is having trouble reading the data. This is because the data signal has degraded through normal drive use.
This is where you need
DiskFresh by Puran Software (free). It will read and write all the disk sectors for you, eliminating the "dips" shown above. You don't want to run this too often on an SSD because writing does
shorten the lifespan of the drive by 1 out of 10,000 writes.
Try not to run anything else while
DiskFresh is busy. You will notice it slows down from time to time, either because the SSD is having difficulty reading your data, or because
Windows is busy writing data to the disk.
I ran
DiskFresh on the first 40% of the drive, and this is the result: good performance over the whole drive once more.
If
DiskFresh reports errors on the drive, then it’s time to bring out the heavy hitter:
SpinRite 6.1, ($89) which requires support for a legacy (as opposed to "
secure") boot. Not all modern PCs have legacy mode. This should be fixed in
SpinRite 7 in a few years.
SpinRite has various recovery modes. I suggest you run it on "Level 1" to get it to tell you what's wrong.
