Hi guys,

Let's say I'm using one of those PCs that uses a SSD flash drive in place of a more regular HDD.

Say I burn my favorite .iso distro and install it on this PC. I install my favorite applications and seek out and install any missing drivers and generally tweak the system like you do. When I am finally happy with it, I make an image of this installation to an external USB drive.

Now, say 9 months later some of those SSD blocks have gone bad because they were erased too often. They're no longer usable. Also, because I'm a sloppy person who can't be bothered to delete redundant stuff and run make-cleans and so forth, the disk is getting pretty cluttered and takes longer and longer to do stuff.

I decide the obvious solution is to remove and save any data I need to keep, then just over-write the disk with the image I made 9 months earlier.

The question is: will the firmware be smart enough to re-map my incoming image to avoid these bad blocks on the SSD? Or am I going to wind up with some parts of the image being located on bad areas of the SSD?

Many thanks....

CC.

The firmware on the SSD takes care of remapping blocks. It does it all the time as you use it. Even if a block isn't bad, the data gets remapped to a different block frequently. It uses wear leveling.

Managing "bad blocks" and "wear levelling" aside, remember that SSDs have no moving parts (it takes a significant amount of time to move a HDD's head from the centre of the disk to the edge), so, unlike a real HDD, SSDs do not care where on the SSD the data is physically stored, a bit like RAM really.

So I am suggesting you should look for other reasons for things taking "longer and longer to do stuff" [ Too many unneeded services running, too much GUI eye-candy hogging CPU time ... ]