Questions with Windows on a storage expansion card

I used Rufus to install Windows 11 onto a 250 GB storage expansion card. I am curious as to how long that storage expansion card will last, since it uses flash storage.

I have Linux as my main OS for the built-in storage, but since I am in university, some work will inevitably need to be done on Windows.

Can someone explain to me in layman’s terms how long a 250 GB storage expansion card will last with Windows 11 on it? The workload on it will be a little bit above average. There will be browsing and document editing, but also some design work and perhaps coding as well if I’m on the right track.

(I also want to add that I’ve previously installed and played a video game on there, totaling around maybe 5 hours of gameplay. The laptop was heating up and making sounds for a good 30 minutes to an hours or so, so I stopped and will not continue gaming on it again. With that being said, does this affect the overall lifespan of the expansion card? Or does it only affect the CPU? Or does it affect anything at all?)

I also heard something about throttling issues with the expansion cards. There’s a guide here telling us how to mitigate this, but it only talks about the 1 TB storage expansion card. Am I right to assume that this also goes for the 250 GB card as well? When I shutdown and there happens to be an update, I hear a significant amount of noise while it’s shutting down.

It also says that newer storage expansion cards will already have thermal pads inside them. Does this also count for the 250 GB ones?


And while I’m here, I also want to ask how long a 250 GB storage expansion card would last even without Windows 11, acting simply as a storage device. Say I were to use it at least once a day to transfer three or four files (or edit three/four files), how long would the expansion last me?

No one can say, there are no reports of cards failing due to worn out flash yet.

But modern flash memory controllers have come a long way. Gone are the days where you have to take heroic measures to limit writes, or keep unformatted space on your drive for manual overprovisioning.

Most of the time, the drive will outlive its usefulness. Some good drives may even outlive their owners.

As for heat, the drive will thermally throttle and performance will drop if it’s worked hard. The thermal pad you linked to may or may not be present on newer 250GB cards. You can tell if the entire metal enclosure gets quite hot. If it’s barely warm or if there’s one hot spot, you may need to add a pad per the instructions. It’s cheap and easy, the hardest part is getting the metal case off for the first time. Once completed, it uses the whole metal case as a heatsink. It can go longer without throttling and it will recover quicker after throttling.

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Just to add on about your concerns with noise during updates and when playing games: that’s perfectly normal with these machines. The out of the box power limits are very high for a laptop of this form factor, and that means the fan needs to run faster to sustain that level of performance.

I’ve used my Framework to play games a fair bit over the more than a year I’ve had it, and I haven’t had any consistent issues. If you want to play games, I would say go ahead. As long as you don’t block ventilation, it shouldn’t affect the lifespan of anything in a noticeable way.

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