The normal thing now is to use the Solid State Drives as primary storage units due to their excellent features. You should know that there are different things you cannot do, such as defragmentation, because you will cause a lot of wear and tear on the disk. What is also not recommended is to make a low level formattingbecause it might make your SSD unusable forever.
There are different methods to delete information on a storage drive. The two most common are quick (also called high-level) formatting and low-level formatting. We will first see the differences and then which one you should not apply to your SSD if you want it to last for many years.
Differences between quick and low-level formatting
He quick format or high level is the most common today and is what allows us to adapt Windows to any new unit we install. Explained simply, what the system does is delete the address table. Windows loses reference to files and considers the storage drive empty. In fact, all the files are there and, as long as they are not overwritten, they are perfectly recoverable.
You should know that low-level formatting or Low level format, is less used and requires specific applications. This task takes a lot of time, because it changes their status little by little. What it does is write a 0 where there was a 1 and vice versa. This system is much more reliable, but data can still be recovered, although it is a much more complicated and laborious process.
In reality, low-level formatting only makes sense if we throw away the storage disk. Even when performing this process, safety companies recommend sanding the surface and breaking the plates with a hammer rather than throwing them all away at once. Quick format is designed more to continue using the device, but to “erase” all stored content.
What formatting should not be used on an SSD?
You should know that the biggest weakness of an SSD lies in the writing processes. Wear on these units comes from wear and tear on the cells each time a write process is performed. So much so that the durability of these drives is measured in terabytes written (TBW).
As we mentioned, quick format simply clear address table. Basically, this differs very little from the process of deleting a file. This does not create a significant load on the SSD and this process usually takes a few seconds. Its writing process is very low and does not affect the life of the disk.
Using low-level formatting is like passing a death sentence on an SSD. As we mentioned, this process changes the state of each bit, which is nothing more than a write process. SSDs are made up of millions of bits, so this process is repeated several times, generating a lot of wear and tear on the unit. Once this process is completed, the most normal thing is that the process of reading and writing new data begins to be slow. Therefore, you should never perform low-level formatting.
If we want to continue using this drive, we should never perform a low-level process, but just a quick format. If you want to throw it in the trash, we could do that, but there are simpler mechanisms. In these cases, it is usually recommended to drill holes in the memory chips with a drill, thus rendering any data recovery options useless.
