Superfetch and SSDs. To leave on or off?

I know most people say Superfetch should be off for SSDs.

But I was wondering, if Superfetch preloads applications in RAM and RAM is faster than SSD, why disable it?

SuperFetch: How it Works & Myths

I can see it may have little benefit with SSDs but what would be the negatives of leaving it on?

 

I disabled the service Superfetch, but set EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch to 2 = enable Superfetch for boot only.

 

Good Topic Phil, This may shed some light on this :
Why does Windows 7 disable Superfetch? - AnandTech Forums
Posts 3 and 8 provide some interesting info about the negatives

 

tweakprefetch

 

Personally, I'd leave it on when I get my SSD drive setup. Performance gains would be minimal on a SSD with Superfetch on but it's still there.

It's like saying the average user cannot not notice the performance difference between 4GB and 8GB ram upgrade however the performance gain is there (even if minimal) and the overall Windows experience is smoother with more ram (even if used as Superfetch cache).

 

I have the same reasoning as Phil, it does little for you with a SSD, but i do not see any reason to turn it off. I'd also see it benefit people using two drives in their laptops, a SSD + a HDD.

 

I'm using a Samsung 470 SSD (128GB SATAII) in my Asus U24E. After a fresh reinstall of Windows, I noticed that Superfetch was still enabled. My SSD came with software called SSD Magician which is a utility from Samsung that tweaks the system settings. One of the settings is "OS Optimization," which tunes OS services for better SSD performance. Superfetch, defragmention, & indexing service are disabled as part of the tune. Ready Boost is not available as a option to tune. Finally, a custom Power Configuration is applied, MagicianSamsungSSD, which doesn't appear in Windows Power Options anyways.

If more evidence arises that proves that leaving Superfetch turned on benefits SSD users, THEN I might turn it back on. Otherwise, I'll leave Superfetch off for now.

 

Guys, its not about speed...

The reason why SSD manufacturers recommend turning off superfetch is because SSD's can only take so many read/write cycles to the same sector before performance degrades and superfech will read and write to the same sector many many times

 

Disabling indexing??? Now that has nothing to do with optimization. I'd call that needlessly crippling the system. Why in the world would anybody disable the indexing service, especially with an SSD???

 

As usual, I take a stable system (in the sense I know how it will perform a given task) and then tweak one thing.

The last month it was SuperFetch on both a desktop system and a notebook system (both; Intel SSD's powering Win7x64).

What have I concluded?

No way am I accepting SuperFetch being turned off on my SSD's again.

No matter what Intel and their Intel SSD Toolbox says/complains about...

YMMV...

 

A MS engineer also wrote about this issue before, I think... Windows 7 behavior is currently to leave SuperFetch on even if you have an SSD, as there are performance benefits. I see no good reason to turn it off, so I have it enabled on both my T500 and X120e, as they were by default.

 

I disable indexing.

Everything is a MUCH better and faster solution to indexing multiple large volumes and searching without all the extras. I don't even set it to always on, it just scans changes and rebuilds the index in literally seconds when you start the program.

 

"MUCH" better? In what way? And what do you care how long it takes the indexing service to create the initial index? Yes, that can take a while if you have a very large number of files (I think it's roughly four hours on my machine, but I have more than 100,000 entries), but even during the initial build the indexing has ZERO impact on system performance. Once the index is built, the indexing overhead is completely unnoticeable.

Oh, and Everything, on the other hand, is fast, yes, but not surprisingly so, since it has next to no functionality. All it does is catalog filenames, but it will not allow you to search for the content of files. Obviously, since the Windows indexer indexes files by content as well, it needs to do a lot more work, including reading the entire file contents, rather than just filenames.

So, sure, if you see no need to find files by content, you don't need the indexing service. Some of us, however, find this kind of capability indispensable. Since it has no impact on performance, why in the world would anybody disable it?

 

It's much better in that it searches much much faster and simpler than windows search. It will show all files, instantaneously within seconds of loading the DB, and the search filters you enter after that are near-instantaneous. It builds the index faster than windows in every single situation, on every PC I've used it on. Windows Search is slow. Also everything loads the indexes when you run the program only, it doesn't have an indexing service running constantly in the background. But you can set it to monitor live file changes as well, I don't like that though. Also, I think windows search allows wildcards, but I'm not sure about boolean searches. Everything has boolean searches, wildcards and reg ex. You can select which volumes to include in the DB or not, something I don't think you can do with windows search (not sure though). Everything is awesome and one of the best free search utilities. Especially to handle large quantities (1m+ files). Also, I've been able to get Everything to index/search over network volumes. Have never had much success getting Indexing Service/Windows Search to do that. Also, I like how it's a self contained program, with no integration into the start menu, folder windows, etc. Hence, I disable indexing and uninstall windows search.

I'm not sure about indexing file contents, I don't need that functionality. I needed strictly a file searching utility to serach file names by type, name, date modified etc and to find paths to obscurely saved files, all I'll ever need to reference or filter by is the file name generally. To show results from the contents of files as well would definitely bring up multiple results that would be irrelevant to me in my usage. If I search for file ABC I don't want it showing me every occurrence of "ABC" in the content of my system's files. But as far as running Everything vs Indexing/Search on an SSD everything will be faster, and it will stay off and not index your SSD in the background upon startup. You can never truly turn off Windows Search unless you uninstall/disable it, even at complete idle it will keep running gather queues and more often than not it runs in throttled mode instead of complete idle because our laptops hardly have resource contention for indexing as far as RAM and HDD space is concerned.

 

Sure, and so does Windows Search. No difference here.

I thought I had explained to you that

• That's obvious, since all it does is reading the MFT, scanning the file names only. Windows Search actually reads the files.
• All that's slow about Windows Search is the initial build of the index. Since this is a one-time task, it really doesn't matter.

So? Again, why would you care? Indexing service takes next to no resources, and its presence is not noticeable. In other words, turning it off makes no meaningful difference.

Huh? Is this supposed to be a joke? Windows Search does, of course, support a full query language far more powerful than anything that Everything has. It can do things you probably never dreamed of. Hey, you can even tell it to switch to natural language search, if you're not the kind to construct regular expressions for a living. And of course Windows Search is fully configurable, down to the folder level, not just by volume. Oh, and by the way, if you insist you can configure Windows Search to only index files by name, too, in which case it will build its index just as fast as Everything.

It seems you are comparing Everything to a Windows service you know next to nothing about here...

Sure, sure. It's also useless, since everything Everything does can be done by Windows Search. There's no need whatsoever to install a third-party utility.

I wonder why. That's no problem.

Well, guess what: You can tell Windows Search to only search for a given filename if that is what you want/need. Everything, on the other hand, will never be able to tell you where that letter is you wrote, addressed to Jim, telling him about the newest addition to your postage stamp collection.

All you have to do is type File:filename, with whatever wildcards you like. Awesome, isn't it?

That's a fairytale. It's impossible to notice any performance impact of the indexing service. Once the initial index is built, the indexing service will do nothing, unless files are added/modified/deleted. In that case there's so little work to do that you will not notice the indexing service even being present.

Let me make this very simple: The kind of people who claim that the indexing service has an impact on the performance of their system simply don't know what they are talking about. Feel free to show benchmarks, any benchmarks at all, that show a difference. You won't be able to find any, simply because there is no difference.

 

You're missing the point that half that stuff is unnecessary - content search, . I need to search for files, no contents. Why would I let windows sit there and index everything, as you said it does, and constantly have it run in the background. You're telling me its better to leave windows search on and let it constantly index everything, rather than have a search index that searches and indexes only when running. It's not a matter of benchmarks it's a matter of common sense.. why have more processes running than you need to? Windows search will always have searchindexer searchprotocol and searchfilter running in the background. Everything will not leave anything running. When I search, I turn it on and tell it to search, and then we're both done. Why would I want my computer doing these things in the background when I'm not searching for anything?

Let me make this simple: Fewer services running in the background, the better. Everything does everything that windows search can do, without the extra frills or OS integration, with a smaller resource footprint, which is equivalent to nothing when I'm not searching.

Why in the hell would I want that deep of a search index? To find a random man named jim in an archived email somewhere? File search is just that, File search. It's not like I have a bucket of disorganized information that I'm trying to find a needle in, just a vast amount of small log files and backups from which I need to find the paths to quickly.

Windows Search does do more than everything does, but it's a bunch of 'added functionality' I don't need. You see that as a positive, I see that as a stupid feature to have an always on search process

And, if the price for that useless added functionality is a slower index build and constant services running in the background, then I'm going to disable it and use something that does what I want it do to - no more, no less - and does it faster than Windows Search because it doesn't have the "added" functionality of content search. And honestly before I found Everything I used built in Windows Search, and it did not bring up results faster than Everything did, and it wasn't as smooth as Spotlight
.
Also, there's no need to get that wound up about Windows Search.

 

The point you're missing is that it is not "constantly running in the background". Most of the time it does nothing, just like your Everything. The difference is, it's there when needed.

Because it makes no difference?

No, they're not "always running". They're idle, most of the time.

It does not do anything in the background.

I see where you're coming from. I'll tell you a secret: The resources of your computer are there to be used. Having gobs of memory sitting idle is just a waste, plain and simple. As long as whatever you have running has no impact on the responsiveness and performance of your computer, there's no need to worry about reducing resource usage. Here's another secret: trimming Windows services is just about the most pointless and uninformed exercise anybody could come up with.

Like I said, you can configure Windows Search to only have the functionality you want. It's not possible to configure Everything to have the functionality many others need.

I agree, and this is getting off-topic, too, so let's just leave it at that.

 

Samsung SSD Magician also tells me all those things you mentioned are disbled. However, the registry says superfetch is still enabled with a value of 3. But,the Superfetch service is disabled. So, maybe it is not "superfetching" after all. I don't know.

 

Nothing wrong with leaving Superfetch on for SSD's.

Superfetch writes about 200MB onto the SSD everytime the computer is rebooted or shutdown and powered on again, waking from sleep nothing.

So in theory if you reboot or showdown and power up your computer 5 times a day then Superfetch writes about 1TB data onto your SSD.

 

my intel toolbox suggested to disable superfetch. so i did.

disabling windows search is for morons that think they know better (and think "everything" is better in any way, which it isn't).

everything on default except where microsoft, or a manufacturer of a device (intel ssd) tells me otherwise. best experience.

 

If I calculate correctly it's 1 GB?

 

LOL...that's what I meant.

All the most reliable SSD's on the market have a write endurance of 20GB - 30GB of writes per day for at least 3 - 5 years under warranty and up to 50 years lifetime from internal write endurance testing.

 

Your opinion is just that. Your opinion. No need to be a d-bag about it. Everything has been going strong since 08, and has it has a ton of positive rating and downloads on sourceforge et. al. But what do other humans know in comparison to your wisdom... /s

Many people leave superfetch on, the only official intel statement is that it does little to improve performance on the drive and ultimately may be detrimental to long term drive health. Maybe you're a 'moron' for turning it off and fretting over the 1% in drive life and a GB here or there of lost space. But that would just be an opinion now, wouldn't it...

 

no. my stuff is not opinions, but all based on facts and experience.

i never said disabling superfetch is for morons. but disabling it based on some random forum posts or blog posts would be. but if intel has tested and recomends it for THEIR products to be that way, who am i to know better?


disabling search indexing is just stupid. but a lot of people love to be exactly that. it's castrating the functionality of your os without gaining anything. that's why it's stupid.

ssd lifetime is no issue at all to EVER care in ordinary desktop use (that's exactly what those ssds are made for: win7 with search on), so that never matters.

 

Saying windows search is better than everything, or everything is better than windows search is an opinion. Regardless of your experience or usage. It would be more accurate to say, "Windows Search is better than everything for ME" - that's a fact. Don't lessen the integrity of threads by spouting off opinions as facts.

I'm not here to argue the merits of either search function. That was done already. However I have a strong dislike for people who post statements as absolutes. Some other forum member will come in here later on and read this thread, and instead of getting a debate about the pros and cons of either service, they'll see you posting blanket statements. Nice.

 

having it enabled is better than having it disabled, as it never harms you, and is there for you, like any other feature, the moment you need it.

and yes, that's why i state it that way. so that other forum members don't think about the crap that's in there which is totally wrong.

pros: better search than without it.
cons: none.
myths: kills ssd, slows down system. both (esp on an ssd) not true. (was true in pre-win7 and pre-ssd installations like a typical 5400rpm hdd with vista, but that got fixed in sp1 or sp2 back then).

 

I don't think it's smart to disable it without an alternative either; I'm not advocating that. After all we all need some kind of utility to search with. Granted I rarely even use everything, unless I'm trying to make sure uninstalls were thorough or finding system files I generally don't know the location of. I prefer Everything. Others prefer Windows search.

 

"everything" is additional work to install, an additional source of bugs and spyware (yes, friends of mine go to "reputable pc tool pages", download such tools, and then ask why they are full of spyware and other stuff), less tested and debugged for any scenario than the search engine deployed to half a billion computers right now, and more complicated to work (you first have to learn another tool, one that is not present everywhere).

oh, and as it's not a system internal service, the system does not know what it does, and thus, for example, can not optimize it for batterylife itself. so it can't do "oh, i'm low on battery, just forget about additional indexing right now", for example.

no clue if evernote works perfectly transparently trough networks, but i can search my home server in an instant. 8tb of data searched through as if it's just a local search.

i don't care what you prefer (to each it's own little "i feel so geek because i use something non-default to differenciate myself from others"), i just want to make sure that people don't hop onto a bandwagon that does not give them any advantage. those lost are already lost.

 

Additional work to install? You know, foobar2000 is "additional work" to and is probably not as widely deployed as WMP/WMC and does pretty much the same thing. Same can be said for NUMEROUS products. Are you telling me that by your logic everyone who installs a program that emulates a function in windows 7 is performing unnecessary additional work, introducing their computer to bugs and spyware, and complicating their lives by having to 'learn (and I use the term loosely) a new program? That's retarded logic. Yes. We all must be retarded, and you're not... I use VLC and Comodo firewall too, perhaps those are security risks as well as unnecessary since my native windows environment can also play videos and has a built in firewall?! What about CCleaner, should I just stick to windows disk cleaner??

I've downloaded Everything numerous times from voidtools, the official website, and have never gotten 'bugs' or spyware. You're friends are also retarded.

More complicated to work? Firstly, that's relative, secondly, seriously?? It pretty much emulates windows search functionality, but with fewer features that I don't use or care for anyways. How the hell is it more complicated?!

Everything can be set not to index and simply rebuild the index upon starting the program, which with an SSD takes a matter of seconds, if not less. I do that simply to have fewer services running.. has nothing to do with battery life. Even if it did I could care less if my search utility shaves off a couple minutes here n there. But it doesn't.. so.. .

I'm glad you can search your home server.

I don't give care what you prefer either and I don't know why we're going down this road again:

And my main reason in posting here was because of this comment

And using various tools or what not isn't a form of self expression or a means unto itself as differentiation. I don't know where you got that assumption from, but it sounds retarded also, and I'm pretty sure nobody in this thread posted searching for a new search utility to be 'unique' so I don't know wth you're talking about. Nobody is jumping on the bandwagon, so I don't know what you're terrified about; you sound like a condescending preacher losing his followers or something. It's just a search tool. Not the anti-christ. It was offered to the OP as an alternative to windows search. I'm pretty sure most people here on NBR are smart enough to not blindly install programs, and will figure out if they like windows search of everything, no need to fret.. At least the other poster's points of contention were legit. Harder to install, security thread, and you have to learn how to search again? Whatever.

My original point: State your opinions as opinions, otherwise your just as guilty of disseminating 'bad' info. Nobody on these boards has enough single handed experience (or a big enough ego) to consider their statements defacto facts.