Benefits of Solid State Drives (SSD) Optimization (Tweaking)

[army_ant7]

In the "Power Settings Adjustment" page, is it really necessary to use the "High Performance" to achieve that effect? Can't you just use "Balanced" or "Power Saver" (whichever you prefer) then just "change 'Turn off hard disk after' to 0 minutes"? Just a thought.

 

[phate]

"Can You Get More Space or Speed From Your SSD? : Optimizing Precious Solid-State Storage" ........ on Windows You forgot part of the title.

 

[Guest]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Microsoft does alot of this as part of win7 already..

 

[hp79]

For those with 8GB or more RAM just because they are so cheap, and don't do memory intensive stuff, I would suggest against disabling Superfetch. RAM is much more faster than any SSD.

 

[hp79]

Please fix this retarded page navigation menu bar Toms! I've been complaining about it for a long time now.

 

[Taracta]

I have always thought that one of the main reasons to have an SSD is to speed up the page file. Disabling it is one option, if you are willing to take the risk of crashing due to out of memory errors. Switching the page file to HD in not an option because then you would have data that exist on the SSD being paged to the HD based page file and incurring to HD speed penalty which is what the SSD is suppose to help fix.

 

[omnimodis78]

Very good article - simple, but professional. Most things I have already set up a while ago, but the "Adjusting the Power Settings" part was rather news to me. In fact, I am hoping to get a bit more details on that. For instance, what happens if we have multiple hard drives, SSD for system, but HDD for everything else - and I really prefer to have my drives spin down after a little while. No to mention, I don't need a system on maximum performance all the time, but what's up with the garbage collection comment? By garbage collection, are you referring to TRIM?

 

[dalethepcman]

[citation][nom]Taracta[/nom]I have always thought that one of the main reasons to have an SSD is to speed up the page file.[/citation]

Purchasing an SSD to increase the speed of your pagefile is not as beneficial as you might think. RAM has only a slightly higher price, and has a much higher duty cycle thank SSD's. SSD's have a much more limited number of writes (1 million write duty cycle vs unknown/lifetime) and you can get name brand RAM for $10/gb with up to 17 GB/s bandwidth or you can purchase a name brand SSD @ 3-5$/gb with 200-400MB/s bandwidth.

Drop $80 on 8 extra GB of ram and turn off your pagefile. Or if your the stubborn type, make a ramdrive and stick your pagefile on it.

 

[army_ant7]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Microsoft does alot of this as part of win7 already..

Nice reference! Hopefully what they mentioned about Win7 doing this automatically is true.

 

[Guest]

This article helped me to clear up ~14gigs of space on my SSD. Thanks Doug!

 

[tecmo34]

This article helped me to clear up ~14gigs of space on my SSD. Thanks Doug!

Great to hear! Thanks for the feedback

Best Regards,
Doug

 

[snemarch]

Please stop posting advise about issues you clearly aren't equipped to advise about!

Suggestions to turn off pre/superfecth, not knowing the difference between standby and hibernation (and ignoring the "save running app state" benefit), not understanding what Indexing Service really does, giving ill-informed advise on LargeSystemCache...

I'm tired of seeing the same old regurgitated-but-not-understood 'tricks' repeated again and again - this goes for the SSD 'optimizations' as well as 'system optimizations'. It's especially bad when it's done on a supposedly(!) reputable site where people who aren't technically equipped to do their own research swallow the advise blindly.

 

[livebriand]

As for the pagefile, will putting it on a spinning hd slow performance?

 

[snemarch]

[citation][nom]livebriand[/nom]As for the pagefile, will putting it on a spinning hd slow performance?[/citation]Compared to on a SSD, yes - but if you can afford putting a SSD in your machine, you should be able to afford enough RAM to disable the pagefile entirely

 

[Taracta]

[citation][nom]dalethepcman[/nom]Purchasing an SSD to increase the speed of your pagefile is not as beneficial as you might think. RAM has only a slightly higher price, and has a much higher duty cycle thank SSD's. SSD's have a much more limited number of writes (1 million write duty cycle vs unknown/lifetime) and you can get name brand RAM for $10/gb with up to 17 GB/s bandwidth or you can purchase a name brand SSD @ 3-5$/gb with 200-400MB/s bandwidth. Drop $80 on 8 extra GB of ram and turn off your pagefile. Or if your the stubborn type, make a ramdrive and stick your pagefile on it.[/citation]

Yes, this is a good idea also, but with SSD ten times cheaper than RAM\GB I would rather use the extra money getting a larger SSD than increasing RAM over what I believe to be the minimum of having 2GB/core RAM.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]snemarch[/nom]Please stop posting advise about issues you clearly aren't equipped to advise about!Suggestions to turn off pre/superfecth, not knowing the difference between standby and hibernation (and ignoring the "save running app state" benefit), not understanding what Indexing Service really does, giving ill-informed advise on LargeSystemCache...I'm tired of seeing the same old regurgitated-but-not-understood 'tricks' repeated again and again - this goes for the SSD 'optimizations' as well as 'system optimizations'. It's especially bad when it's done on a supposedly(!) reputable site where people who aren't technically equipped to do their own research swallow the advise blindly.[/citation]

Please share! Self-proclaimed experts have an open invitation to spread their knowledge with the community. We welcome it for the betterment of all! =)

 

[porksmuggler]

Where have I seen this optimization guide before? The layout, the order of optimizations, even the title of each section,hmm, oh maybe here:

http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/

The first result when you google "ssd optimization"

Doug, are you affiliated with The SSD Review by any chance?

 

[tecmo34]

No... I'm not affiliated with SSDReview, though I have seen that optimization guide before. This is based off of a HowTo guide I create back in Dec of 2010 for Tom's Hardware sister site Computing.net.

Any similarities were not attended or on purpose on my part. If so, I would've acknowledge the site, as the source. It basically comes down to there being only some many ways to say / show the same thing.

 

[porksmuggler]

Can you link that HowTo guide here?

I understand you're saying you've seen the guide on The SSD Review before, and similarities were not Intented, but some of what you have here is verbatim, in a way that would not be considered unavoidable.

 

[thessdreview]

This article is an unfair representation of present day ssds. The X25m was one of the few where this article would have applied and is quite outdated now. If we did same tests on present day SSDs, we would find quite the opposite situation. The article linked in The SSD Review above is my own and was based on the X25m.

One needs to test the results with WCBF both on and off to determine whats best for them. IMHO...poor effort when one uses a very outdated SSD in todays SSD environment.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]porksmuggler[/nom]Can you link that HowTo guide here?I understand you're saying you've seen the guide on The SSD Review before, and similarities were not Intented, but some of what you have here is verbatim, in a way that would not be considered unavoidable.[/citation]

Pork,

Doug's How-To Guide is right here: http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html.

I did a lot of heavy editing to this piece; please feel free to contact me at cangelini at bestofmedia.com if you have originality concerns. I'm happy to investigate!

All the best,
Chris

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]thessdreview[/nom]This article is an unfair representation of present day ssds. The X25m was one of the few where this article would have applied and is quite outdated now. If we did same tests on present day SSDs, we would find quite the opposite situation. The article linked in The SSD Review above is my own and was based on the X25m.One needs to test the results with WCBF both on and off to determine whats best for them. IMHO...poor effort when one uses a very outdated SSD in todays SSD environment.[/citation]

Greetings,

Please feel free to clarify your comment.

"If we did same tests on present day SSDs, we would find quite the opposite situation."

The opposite of what?

The controller in the second-gen X25-M is the same as found in the SSD 320--I'm sure you know this. Also, the Vertex 2 is still a very widely deployed product; these are still very much present-day SSDs.

Of course the editorial team and I always appreciate feedback, and I constantly have my eyes tuned to this space for constructive commentary. Thank you!

Chris

 

[porksmuggler]

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Pork,Doug's How-To Guide is right here: http://www.computing.net/howtos/sh [...] /552.html.I did a lot of heavy editing to this piece; please feel free to contact me at cangelini at bestofmedia.com if you have originality concerns. I'm happy to investigate!All the best,Chris[/citation]

Thanks Chris, I had found Doug's HowTo, and noted the date. No real concern here with integrity, I have no affiliation with The SSD Review. There's more than a passing resemblance here though...Maybe Doug and Les should chat, since they think so much alike.

 

[pc-dummy]

I am confused about prefetch? I would think that data in ram is faster than a ssd? but even intel says to turn it off. I just cant get my head around it.

 

[porksmuggler]

[citation][nom]pc-dummy[/nom]I am confused about prefetch? I would think that data in ram is faster than a ssd? but even intel says to turn it off. I just cant get my head around it.[/citation]

That's not quite how prefetch works, which dates back to XP, then followed by superfetch in Vista for better performance on mechanical drives. Here's a couple links that explain what the fetches do, and why SSDs don't benefit from either.

Logical Prefetcher:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463468.aspx

With SSDs:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx