SSD optimization guide

Hi everyone,

I've been searching for an SSD optimization guide but there a several and I wasn't sure which one to follow. Can you guys recommend me one with a link?

Also, I have to upgrade my HDD with my SSD and is there a guide for that also? (I've never done this before)

Thanks!

 

Step ONE:
Ignore all SSD Optimization Guides.

Step TWO:
See step one.


The above is true with Win7 SP1; with any other O/S you are taking risks with performance, reliability and durabilty of your SSD.

 

As tiller mentioned if you run Windows 7, and usually from a fresh install, everything should be just fine. You don't really need much more, and can probably ignore the rest of my post.

However, if you still would like to learn more on what happens underneath the covers or see what is out there, I found these two links have some interesting discussions / info -

SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7 - Windows 7 Forums

Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

 

thank you guys so much!

 

Much agreed with tiller.

I just got my Sammy 830 256GB to replace my Intel 80GB x25-m. I've done a few little tweaks here and there to get performance up, but that was a long time ago.

I noticed that the Magician software that came with the new SSD actually has a recommended setting to disable Drive Indexing. Tiller may remember my rants a while back about how stupid an idea that is. So, I'm posting in the Samsung support questioning WHY such a poor recommendation is being made. The benefits of indexing FAR OUTWEIGH any wear & tear on the drive. The W&T being so nominal, that I'd have more chances of being struck by lightning before it showed any impact on the life of the drive.

 

^I am interested to hear what Samsung support has to say as well. I currently have Drive Indexing disabled.

 

Disabling drive indexing may give a faster 'score' on SSD's: but it also negatively impacts the real world use of the system.

Enable indexing and use Win7 as it's meant to be used.

As to prolonging the life of the SSD with it disabled: hogwash. Unless you are wiping your drive of DATA and filling it again (and forcing the new DATA to be re-indexed) multiple times a day.

Use your SSD's as if you would use your HDD's; both start to stutter and fail (performance-wise) when used to capacity and both benefit from short-stroking (partitioning).

Any other 'tweaks' are a delusional waste of time.

 

Just to play devil's advocate, why? Do you have any threads to your rants?

I don't have indexing enabled on my SATA II Crucial 300. File searches on the C300 take miniscule amts of time (mere seconds in most case) over 150+GB. I haven't missed it being off one bit, and curious on your point of view.

 

jclausius,

and with it enabled; you are seeing the search results as you type.

Huge performance difference that makes no sense to disable imo.

 

My guide to optimizing SSDs

Step 1: turn AHCI on in bios

Step 2: install OS

Step 3: Profit

As far as search or the deprecated indexing term, why disable one of the best features that vista/7 brought us? Also if youre going to buy and setup a hard drive (whether it be SSD or mechanical) dont plan on it failing, rather plan for IF it fails and use the drive as it is designed. No sense in speeding up your system with an ssd and then gimping it by turning certain things off.

 

I have an Intel drive and the only tweak recommending in the toolbox is disabling superfetch on the SSD only, probably because superfetch doesn't really do anything on a SSD rather than minimizing the amount of writes from superfetch.

 

And having tried both SuperFetch disabled and enabled: I'm ignoring Intel's suggestion and going with the faster setup...

 

Here are two of my posts:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...es/542511-got-my-ssd-today-2.html#post6994322
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/533819-ssd-tweaks-tips-7.html#post7318908

And on another site:
I figured out a new trick to speed up your ssd

Here's how you don't know you've missed it. Press your start button and type the name of a song. Does it come up immediately, or after a short pause?

Another example is to search by the contents of a document, not its title. This cannot be done w/o indexing enabled. I can literally type a few key words that would be inside the document, but not in the title, and have the document appear in my search results.

There is no benefit to disabling indexing whatsoever. I'm sure that, in a vacuum, someone may be able to prove the slightest of lifespan improvement, but why get an SSD if not for its inherent speed in all things?

Also, my 80GB Intel is still at 99% for the wearout indicator after 2 years of heavy use.

 

I have to agree with anseio here and superfetch is still enabled on my SSDs by the way. I saw no point in disabling it for negligible amounts of writes saved.

 

Thanks!

I think that the disabling of Superfetch has less to do with writes as it does with reads. SSD's are so fast, in comparison to HDD's, that fetching programs and loading them to RAM before they're needed is less of a wonderful feature. RAM still being faster, I suppose it's nice to keep enabled anyway.

I'm not going to go through and undo most of the changes I made 2 years ago. When I get my AW M18x later this year though, I'll just not change anything from the way it initially is.

 

Yeah, all those SSD optimization tweaks remind of the old vista days when everyone proposed disabling OS features. Sure it is something you can do, but can doesn't mean should. In the end it's up to the individual user, but never blindly follow so called optimization guides. It's better to read up on what each feature does and how it works, then make your own informed decision which for most people will lead to leaving indexing and superfetch enabled. If someone doesn't want to take the time to do this, he's better leaving everything alone aside from defrag and TRIM.

 

Actually, no matter how great it seems when shipped - I do a proper 'clean' install on any new system I get.

Manufacturer's and vendor specific 'tweaks' are the worst kind...

 

As Anseio stated, was several years ago when SSD's first really started becoming mainstream. Then the worry for many of us was since no one had had one long enough to have it get to the end of the write cycle life, all we had was the manufacturers estimated number. For the 34nm it was estimated at about 5000 cycles. So everyone was looking for ways to limit unneeded writes. Based on what many were writing to their SSD on a daily basis, some people were looking at less than 2 years life from their (then) extremely expensive drive.

Since then, there have been studies such as this: SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm - Page 34
that show that for the most part, our drives will probably outlive our laptops.

The drive in this Sager has nearly 400 TBs and still shows 100% life remaining. My other drives are older and have much more written to them, with the exception of the Intel 310.

In short, as the other posters have said, it is not an issue to worry about anymore ( number of writes to the drive). Put it in, install the OS and love it.

 

Agreed. The total time from start to finish for a clean install on my m4600 was like 1.5 hours. Thats including installing the msata drive and now I have a clean install configured the way I want it to. I did this over imaging the "perfect" install I did on my mechanical as with windows 7 and an SSD it takes no time at all to do things from scratch now. Back in the windows xp and earlier days I could understand, but as of 2009 there is no reason not to do a clean install.

 

I'm talking about something like:

(win)
c:> dir *.java /s

(or [cygwin] find /cygdrive/c/ -name *.java)

takes about 2 seconds total.

What does you mean by your post?

 

Thx. I'll give it a look.

Don't have any songs on here, but do have tons of source files. Now, if I type a name of a known file, the search comes up immediately, but the results are blank. Note, if I do something like click START and start typing c:\program files(x86)\... that is pretty much instantaneous on both my SSD as well as my mirrored RAID volume although neither are in the Index configuration.

[EDIT]I just edited the Indexing properties to add a directory to the index. If I go to the Windows button, and now type the filename, it now pulls up that file. Handy feature for those who may not know what's on disk, and I can see the usefulness. I guess I'm too old school in that I know pretty much where are files are on disk, and I just use "dir /s" and wait a sec, maybe two max. Good info to know though. Perhaps I may look at changing work habits in the future.[/EDIT]

Hmmm... Doesn't everyone just use grep (cygwin) or findstr (win)?

 

I think its assumed that windows is the OS for this thread .

 

Yes, "dir" and "findstr" are Windows utilities... Extremely helpful utilities. (Typo in my post above... re-editing and pointing out utility source.)

 

i now learned something new and will use 'findstr' from now on. thanks a lot.

 

NP. Feel free to rep the post.

I apologize for the OT tangent, but if you're interested in other commands - Windows CMD Commands

 

CMD lines might be OT, but they are always handy.