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

[ProDigit10]

you can also compress and delete the the 'NTuninstall' directories in your Windows folder, and move the compressed archive to an external drive.
Those directories are only good for when upgrading software, or removing it.
Most of us have software running on our pc's, and don't really upgrade them.

 

[Guest]

Disabling the pagefile is also going to impact performance negatively, as the aforementioned fragmentation issue will crop up. You want a pagefile at least the size of your, RAM, ideally larger to optimize general performance. No point in saving a handful of gigs if memory subsystem performance goes down the crapper.

 

[tomfreak]

on Win7 64bit, with 4 GB of RAM I still get paged by 150MB with firefox + firewall anti-virus running only. Win7 used up 1.3GB, 1.43GB is cached after all that I still have 1.3GB free.

I dont get this why would window page my HDD when there are still 1.3GB free, it makes perfect sense to disable it. (but I cant 4GB isnt enough to turn off for heavy gaming)

 

[daglesj]

Why is it we get a different set of comments for the UK version of this article? I can understand having different articles for different locations but shared articles should have just one comments list surely?

 

[macewrox]

If you do the "Power Adjustment Settings" portion and you also have HDD's for storage, wont that jack up your HDD because it will be on ALL THE TIME?

 

[tecmo34]

If you do the "Power Adjustment Settings" portion and you also have HDD's for storage, wont that jack up your HDD because it will be on ALL THE TIME?

In the test setup or in my "everyday" setup, I have not encountered an issue with the hard drives under the "Power Adjustment Settings". I run my personal setup with a SSD (OS and Apps), Western Digital 300GB Velociraptor (Games) and Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB (Storage, low usage Apps, and USER Folder) without effect on my hard drives.

 

[jemm]

Great work, keep going!

 

[juanc]

Holy moses!

Disable the PageFile and Windows will create TEMPORARY PAGEFILES! So it will be even worst, because it will cause more fragmentation, and the same or worst writing to your drive.

Yes Windows will tell you, when you boot, that it will enable a temporary pagefile

 

[Tattysnuc]

Nice to see a useful, quantitative and qualitative report from Toms, and not just on one SSD model. Excellent report guys - Keep up the good work

 

[metawin]

If you still want a swap file (or any other temporary file)you can make a RAMdisk and use it instead. Make sure you have sufficienct RAM though (ofc), which it is so cheap right now there is no reason not to get a little more and make a RAMdisk, imo.

 

[Guest]

Hi guys,

I have a big concern about ssd's: reliability... I want to buy an sdd hdd so I've been reading, not only pro's test but also a lot of final buyers comments, and in most of then, despite the manufacturer, I read about a lot of failures, some ssd hdd died in a couple of months, and a lot of them show a hdd health low and rapidly decreasing... ssd's are fast, yes, but are they reliable? what do you think?

 

[tecmo34]

SSD's are reliable, just as much as a mechanical drive.. IMO.

It seems like SSD's have gotten some bad press of late with some recent issues (Corsair recall, Kingston V100 firmware issue and OCZ Vertex 2 25 nm issue)... IMO There has been some bad press going around about the Sandforce 2200 SSD's but they seem to be getting corrected with firmware updates.

On the other side, you have companies like Intel and OWC that have extended some of their SSD warranties to 5 years, which speak to the manufacturer standing behind the reliability of these drives.

 

[Guest]

I tried the changes listed in the article on a system running an OCZ Revodrive X2 PCi-e SSD and the results were very bad. I don't know if this is due to the OCZ mentioned running what is effectively a 4-drive RAID 0 or something to do with it being PCI-e instead of SATA but the results were quite bad. Of course there is every possibility I made a mistake somewhere so I invite others to check my work. Regardless I enjoy all the hard work and expertise of Tom's Hardware and look forward to every visit.

 

[okcomputer360]

A new technology emerging has been from Romex software, called fancy cache, they've been working (on some level) with OCZ Technology.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/index.html
recomended for users with more then 6gbs or ram, I also found a nice user made ui for this sftware within the forums.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/bbs2/en-us/viewtopic.php?f=26&p=2200&sid=3728fb3b433d2a959c0a97380804872b#p2200

all in all increases read/write times considerably, especially when used with a modern SSD

 

[okcomputer360]

one more note on fancy cache.. Also may prolong the life of SSD's since its not doing constant cycles for them random writes.

Lets take a look at the numbers.

http://i53.tinypic.com/20u72av.png

It can access hidden memory if you have over the 3.25gb limit and running a 32bit OS and use the hidden memory for the cache if you enable PAE.

 

[tecmo34]

@okcomputer360: Very interesting you bring up the topic of Fancy Cache

I had a conversation with Chris Angelini on this very topic shortly after my article was published. I was discussing the article with one of the techs from OCZ and he pointed me to this thread on their forum ( http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?79525-Interesting-new-hybrid-disk-cache ), as an additional way to improve performance.

It is a very interesting program that could hold some value, specially with their development work with OCZ. It might be something that is visited more closely down the road by Tom's Hardware

 

[tecmo34]

Here is a screen shot of my WESTERN DIGITAL WD1600AAJS-75M0A0 160GB 7200RPM SATA HD on my work PC before and after utilizing Fancy Cache.... (though in the OCZ thread, you see feedback that it may not provide any "real-world" benefit?).

Before
http://i964.photobucket.com/albums/ae127/Tecmo34/Other%20PC%20pics/FancyCache-Before.png


After
http://i964.photobucket.com/albums/ae127/Tecmo34/Other%20PC%20pics/Fancy-After.png

 

[Guest]

I implemented these tweaks and now my OS will not boot! Looks like something did not play nice with Windows, yikes. I have an Intel X25 80GB. (I did not do the tweak with the Intel warning). Anyone have any ideas what happened?

 

[tecmo34]

Did you switch from IDE to AHCI without making the register tweak first? This would cause your system not to boot properly. I would recommend taking this topic to the actual forum for better feedback.

Best Regards,

Doug

 

[Ubrales]

Excellent article with good information!

 

[Guest]

Some good tips but it needs some proper research really, for instance:

If you install Win 7 to the SSD (which you should anyway, cloning should be avoided for a number of reasons) unneeded services such as prefetch are already disabled on the SSD but will still be enabled on any HDDs you may have installed i.e. how you want it.

As for services like SuperFetch and Indexing, I see no reason to disable them. SSDs may be faster + more responsive than a HDD but still lag far behind system RAM. And I suppose it's a personal choice but searching for documents without indexing is a pain.

Oh and I wish articles like this would quit telling people to use the 'high performance' power profile without any explanation - it sets the CPU to always run at full clock speed, even when idle, rather than slowing down when idle, so using far less power, and returning to normal when loaded. Basically, it just wastes power (quite a lot for high-end CPUs) and will likely increase fan speed for no performance gain.

 

[derschuhmacher]

I just got this new latop on Friday and have been doing stuff to upgrade it and install some programs, updates, etc. Before I started this checklist, I had 187 GB out of 223 GB (a 240GB SSD), and just did all these tips and now I am at 200GB free out of 223!

This definitely worked for me and my laptop is a few fractions of time faster

 

[mark717]

I just wanted to add a bit of updated info about Windows 8 and SSDs. Thanks to Doug Crowthers for such a great, helpful in-depth article.

Windows 8 has changed it's settings now with the RTM release and it is no longer necessary to disable defrag, Superfetch or hibernation if you do a clean install.

It took me quite a while to hunt down up-to-date information for SSDs and Windows 8, especially with all the info out there, but it is out there. I'm sure once Windows 8 becomes available on October 26th that more information on SSDs and Windows 8 will become easier to find.

I did have to turn off System Restore if I wanted it off but with newer SSDs coming down in price and larger SSDs become more affordable it becomes less of a need to do so unless you have third party software running to do back ups. Also with the newer SSDs life spans have increased and more frequent writes to an SSD becomes less of an issue. My oldest (2nd gen) SSD drive's estimated life span is January 2021. I'm pretty sure I'll be replacing that laptop well before then.

I have found the following useful info:

Defrag now detects if you have a SSD (and a 2nd HDD if your system has both) and applies the correct settings to each drive. Defrag on SSDs is now called "Optimize" and runs trim commands instead of defragging the drive while HDD settings remain the standard defrag.

Again with Superfetch, Windows 8 if detects if you have a SSD only or an SSD and an HDD and applied the appropriate settings for each drive so that they can coexist together happily and both at peak performance.

Hibernation is disabled automatically on every machine I installed Windows 8 that has an SSD.

Hope this helps out those looking for updated info.

 

[Guest]

Can you do all of these steps after a Windows installation? If not, which ones specifically wouldn't work? Thanks.

 

[tecmo34]

Can you do all of these steps after a Windows installation? If not, which ones specifically wouldn't work? Thanks.

These are all completed after a Windows Install..