What damages Solid State Drive SSD

Deleting information from a hard drive doesn’t actually erase it. When you delete a file, the file is still there. You’ve merely removed it from the disk directory—the system that tracks all the files and where they’re located—and marked the space the file occupies as free for use.

What damages an SSD is writing information to it. Every time you record information to an SSD, you damage it. The memory cells in an SSD have a limited, and surprisingly short, life expectancy. They can only be written to a certain number of times before they stop being able to retain information. Each write wears them.

So it’s not deleting files, it’s adding files (or modifying files), that causes the damage

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY APPLE REMOVE THE HOME BUTTON

The home button doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with. When I was introduced to the iPhone back in 2007, the very first question I asked was, “If the whole screen is touch-sensitive, why do you need a physical button?”

Things got more confusing when one of my wife’s friends enabled her iPhone’s AssistiveTouch on-screen home button, “If Apple already has a software home button built in, why keep the physical one?”

Removing the physical home button means less mechanical parts to assemble, fewer things to break, and better waterproofing. It also means you can put a larger screen on a smaller device. From a design perspective, it was bad to ever put it on the iPhone in the first place, so why did Apple do it?

The answer is usability. Back when the iPhone first came out, nobody was familiar with how to navigate a smartphone user interface, and ideas like swiping & finger gestures were new concepts to most users. The home button was an intuitive way to prevent people from getting lost & frustrated.

Later, Apple painted themselves into a corner by adding Touch ID fingerprint recognition to home button, which made it more difficult to get rid of the button when Apple decided to go to a full touchscreen on the front face.

To answer the question: Apple removed the home button because it prevented them from making a full-screen bezel-less display, and they were able to do it because users understand smartphones well enough to use the bottom-swipe as an alternative to a mechanical button.

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EFFECTs OF OVER CHARGING LAPTOP BATTRY

Keeping batteries at 100 % charge places physical forces on the components inside the battery. When the battery discharges a little, the charger will top it off. All the energy required to stuff that last bit if charge in the battery makes it hot. Heat severely limits the life span of a battery.

Ellery Davies is correct. Modern battery charges behave in a way to mitigate these issues. But they can’t completely eliminate them. Simon Khoury is also correct saying that keeping the battery between 20% and 80% will significantly prolong its life. But the important question is, what is the impact of shorter battery life?

The battery in my Dell Latitude laptop is easily replaced. I guess a new battery might cost $100 or so. When the battery stops working, I’ll look at how old the computer is and what shape it’s in, and either decide to order a new battery or buy a new laptop. I’ll probably decide on the new laptop. “Babying” the battery won’t make much difference, if any.

The battery in my Microsoft Surface Go is not user replaceable. I’m not sure whether Microsoft can replace it. For me, it’s worth the money and effort to buy a timer. I know it takes 15 minutes to add 10% charge. (This “rule”, whatever it is for your computer, will change dramatically above 80% charge. It takes a lot of work to get that last 20%. The charger has to slow down so the battery doesn’t overheat.) When the battery gets low, I set the timer and plug it in. If that’s not feasible because I’m traveling or whatever, I try not to worry about it too much.

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