Where does the SSD noise come from?

by Paul | Last Updated: July 5, 2022

Funny enough the SSD drive is not so silent, especially during writing data, it has a clicking sound, so where does SSD noise come from?

Where does the SSD noise come from?

The noise comes from the processor circuit that is caused by the piezoelectric effect which resonates producing sounds that are audible to us.

It is no indication of any problem or failure.

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Inside SSD

I still recommend having an SSD in your computer as this will usually make, the system feels much faster and more responsive.

When you buy an SSD, you will notice something funny why does it have unconventional capacities like 480GB or 960GB.

If you have bought one that advertised to hold more amount of data like 512GB when those your computer tell you the capacity is far lower.

Part of this, is simply due to formatting overhead, meaning when your computer prepares an empty drive for use, it needs to organize it into sections, which comes to some space, but this is true but is true for both SSDs and old mechanical style. hard drives.

SSDs ending up with an oddball capacity has more to do with a data storage technic called overprovisioning.

Now, this might sound like the kind of thing someone in a bunker those, think the world is going to end tomorrow, but because the NAND flash that makes up an SSD has an inherently limited lifespan, it can only be written to a finite number.

This is a strategy that makes tons of sense for SSDs. Where you see SSDs store data in pages that are then organized in two blocks, unlike a hard drive where any particular piece of data can be overwritten at any moment.

SSD instead has to erase an entire block, if it wants to update pages that are already written, the SSD controller, will instead write the new data to an extremely blank block

Later any pages in the original block that are still good are copied over to a different block and the original is erased in the process known as garbage collection, it is pretty easy to see that SSDs need to have a certain amount of blank or overprovisioned pages ready to go whenever the user wants to overwrite something.

Which is responsible for most of the large discrepancies in raw vs usable capacity. It is not all drives that have the same percentage of overprovisioning.

SSDs tend to slow down once they start getting full, so manufacturers will often provide an amount of space that goes well beyond, the bare minimum of 7.3%.

The difference between the exactly one billion bytes of gigabytes and the 230 definitions, so unflattering called a gibibyte.

Higher-end SSDs can overprovision as much as 28%, so an SSD that has a true capacity of 512GB might only appear as a 400GB drive to your OS.

Although it does suck to lose all that space, it increases longevity and keeps the drive from slowing down too much especially if you are writing lots of data to it frequently.

You can overprovision additional space on your drive yourself, either by leaving some of the SSD unpartitioned which should cause it to treat that portion as an overprovisioning space or by using a software utility

If you can not come close to filling your drive you might want to try it out, after all a little extra space is never a bad things

Lifespan estimation of SSD

Even as SSDs have higher reliability than hard drives they do not last forever. They store data a lot differently than hard drives, which means their lifecycle is way different.

SSD stores data in a flash memory cell where each cell can store more bit or more depending on more factors we will discuss.

SSD flash cells can only be written a certain number of times before they start to degrade because these SSDs use a technology called wear leveling where it strategically places data around the entire SSD and decides where it is going to write certain things and erase certain things.

Its maxims the life of the SSD by not writing too many cells individually at once too quickly and it is going to maximize how all the cells last.

The number of write cycles per cell on an SSD depends on a few factors. First of all, whether it is 3D NAND or not, even if the NAND flash is the type of flash SSDs use mostly and how many levels per cell.

There are 4 different levels per cell SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC. The reason 3D NAND flash lasts a lot longer is because it is a different type of technology, I am going to get into what 3D NAND is. It is an improved technology of flash memory.

SSD because they have this write cycle limitation. SSD manufacturers have created a couple of specs that tell you how long SSD is supposed to last.

The two main ones you are going to see are terabyte written and disk writes per day.

Terabytes written is the easier one to understand and simply estimate how much data in terabytes total for the life of the drive can handle. A bigger drive has more storage to spread the data across on what has been written, which means it can handle way more data over its lifetime

Disk writes per day tell you how many times the capacity of the drive can be written to the drive per day over the life of the warranty.

You can use this to reverse calculate the number of terabytes written.

It is important to know that even when your SSD makes that squealing noise it does not mean it is damaged and the examples above have shown you how much life you have on your SSD.

You do not need to worry.