Should I disable Superfetch if I have a slow hard drive?

[louisaldous]

Programs take ages to load and whenever I look on task manager Superfetch is always using the disk the most.

I know what Superfetch does (loads commonly used programs onto RAM for faster loading) and I was wondering, because I have a very slow hard drive (I'm going to use HDD for short), I should disable it because it is probably taking ages to load programs into the RAM from the HDD.

I can understand why it would be useful for someone using an SSD because of the fast load times but is it worth it for a slow 5400RPM HDD?

Thank you for any replies.

 

[salerhino]

Well, try it.

 

[salerhino]

Also, I think it is more for low on RAM users than low on rpm users.

 

[BFG-9000]

I think you have it backwards, someone with a SSD will benefit from it far less because the seek time of the SSD is only 1,000x slower than RAM while your slow HDD is 150,000x slower. Given enough RAM, Superfetch makes only the first access slow.

You would rather not load your programs from RAM and would prefer loading them from the slow disk each time? Once the most commonly used files are loaded into RAM, they get accessed from there instead of the disk. Rarely used programs are obviously loaded from disk but if you start to use them they will get cached into RAM as well.

The "problem" seems to be that Superfetch takes a long time after bootup to do its thing, so it's better to sleep or hibernate the system rather than having to wait each time after a cold boot.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM and obviously such a system works best if you have a lot of RAM to cache more files.

 

[clemens_ratte_polle]

Superfetch (svchost.exe) takes a long time after Hibernation on my PC!
And this seemingly ONLY when using Browsers with Chromium Blink engine: Opera, Chrome, Vivaldi.
Is there a coherence?

Perhaps the engine ist sorting at startup and provocates Superfetch?
How can one investigate this?