SSD Tweaks and Tips

I understand that there will always be debate and discussion about SSD optimizations. Look at the SSD Thread (Benchmarks, Brands, News, and Advice). It's got over 7500 posts and is neverending.

I think where the problem began, and I can assure you that this is not just my impression, is that the wording of your original post came across quite strongly that Les' recommendations were lunacy and were all disproved by someone with passionately different opinions on a different forum. It only seemed natural to rush to Les' defense. It wasn't until your later posts, that you came across as being less critical. By then, you had already been attacked back.

It's a shame this discussion has turned out so poorly, on both sides.

Edited to remove rebuke.

 

Love reading conversations such as this and enjoi responding, as I did on Anand. Its unfortunate that one never read through the entire thread, otherwise his viewpoint would be different. My points, in the end, resulted in no logical rebuttal other than my friends creation of the thread as I was a new member and, well, we all don't like people jumping in to our turf now do we?

I would more than welcome ANY thoughts you may have other than to say "Someone called him out and he backed down." The truth is that I never backed down and my points were taken...again if you read through the entire thread.

To make it very clear, I dont think I am any more knowledgeable than any of them nor do I than any of you. I believe we all have a piece of the puzzle and at the end of the day we get it put together through intelligent conversation.

Having said that, I invite you to bring forward any optimization that you might not agree with for discussion. Rather than stating anothers point of view lets stick to our own knowledge or that of the experts like Intel and MS Engineers if thats ok. I wouldnt want to bring forward that the person on Anand that disagreed with me also disagreed with all of the experts in the field. As well, I wouldn't want to mention that that specific Guide is probably the most popular piece of literature on the internet right now. Its traffic is worldwide and the appreciation that is received is amazing....in several languages and thank God for internet auto translation now.

So...lets get her going. Im game!

Oh and one other thing...good to see you got the renice. Where did you read about such an amazing card?

 

I'm guessing that maybe three posts were removed there, and it seems like we are the better for it.

So back to the technical talk...
I noticed that pagefile was taking up 8GB on the drive. I thought about turning it down to 1GB. But, I decided to just disable it entirely for know and see how that goes.

Between that and turning off hibernate, I figure I freed up about 15GB.

 

I just turned hibernation on this week to try it out. It's only 3GB.

AND... I checked SMART data and saw that hibernating only caused .5GB in writes to my SSD. I never keep that many things open that are important. I'll time a few wake up's from hibernation and see if it's a worthy improvement over a shutdown.

I was completely fine without the page file. The only things that wanted it were a few video games, so I have it on my 2nd HDD. Since it's there, I think a few other programs may be using it.

 

I find that I am always using sleep/standby, so that I always set the power button to put the laptop to sleep.
I just never really hibernate. It feels like starting up from hibernate is as slow as a fresh bootup.

 

I've got BSOD issues with sleep. Found a program yesterday that can help me figure out the dmp file, but forgot about it already. Thanks for reminding me. Will try it tonight and see if I can fix the problem.

 

In my experience it is extraordinarily rare to design an optimization that wins across the board. Optimizations by their very nature tend to rely on a set of assumptions which when violated can wind up causing more harm than good.

As a hypothetical, before paging out memory it can make a lot of sense to compress it first. By doing so we can save both time and space as crunching the memory actually requires less time than doing i/o to a conventional disk. Given the boost in performance, we turn this behavior on by default. But is this still the case if you happen for whatever reason to be paging to a ram disk? We still save space, but at a cost of performance as minimizing the xfer size buys us far less than the cost of compression. For some, as ram is precious, that may still be the correct trade off, for others it may well not be. To pick just one thing on the list, while I havent researched prefetch deeply, I've little doubt that it is heuristic, not algorithm. If the MS engineers assumptions about the environment and work loads hold, you'll love it, if not...

So while I think that while many of us love to cling to the notion that there is that magic combination of switches that will make everything behave optimally, IMO, that is an overly simplistic view. Rather, behind all these optimizations and tweaks there is a set of assumptions that may or may not hold for a given machine and work load. There just aint a one size fits all answer here, but I am grateful to have the information and debate, such that I can hold these things up to what I wish to do and make the trade off decisions for myself rather than have them imposed on me in the dark.

 

For the most part, no single optimization in Win7 with an SSD is going to gain you any noticeable performance whatsoever. It can get you alot of drivespace back however. We need to look at where most of the things that we discuss in these optimizations were first created.....XP and then Vista.

When you look at Pagefile, Indexing, SuperFetch, and Prefetch (off the top of my head) you are not gaining anything visible by turning these off. The question is that, since there is absolutely no performance gain that anyone can show with them on, why do we want all these services running in the background for no reason.

Pagefile is simple... If you have 4Gb of RAM you will never truly need it. The mechanics of its operation say its best to turn off actually because if it is on, the system always relies on it to a certain extent even if its not needed. Myself, I prefer to force my system to use the valuable ram I paid for so its off. The RAM is much faster than the SSD. An added bonus is the new way that Win7 chooses to allocate RAM. Wanna see?? Start 50 or so programs all at once and then notice that you still have over 50% RAM available. Would you believe that this is the same even with Pagefile turned off?

As for hibernate, I prefer it off for the space, however, see the other side of the argument where someone likes to leave all of their programs on. I choose to use sleep where I have no problem whatsoever.

Now...getting back to performance... shutting down only one service will not gain performance but anyone who has taken the time to learn through example knows that shutting down a number of unused services decreases start time, lessens the load on the system and increases performance.

The amusing thing in it all is the person that everyone was jumping on has '10 second start' posted in his sig if I recall. The ONLY way to ever get this is through following that in which he contested. It is physically impossible to get a 10 second started otherwise... To take that further, time to boot logon as he shows in his link does not constitue the boot time.

Boot time is the time we press a button until the time the desktop is usable....see below but I have bettered that to 7.2 which is recorded in the appropriate thread. I know of only one other to ever post a faster time and that is Stamatisx on this site with 5 sec.



Later gang...

 

This was correct back in the days of Windows 95/98, but isn't true for NT-based systems (including Windows 7). The paging file is used for a lot more than just an expansion of memory.

First of all, it is used for kernel core dumps. If your machine crashes, this is where the dump gets saved, and upon reboot, it's moved to a *.dmp file which can be submitted to MS for analysis.

Next, with Vista and 7, defragmenting of system files goes through the swap for safety. If a machine crashes at exactly the wrong time, you can risk a system file being damaged. I know, you probably never defragment either, or so seldom that you don't see this as much of a risk. But it's still one factor.

Then, and more importantly, it is used for proactively paging out memory pages that aren't accessed. If your machine loads a an app or library that has English, Swahili, Swedish and Korean support built-in, the memory pages that point to the extra languages are probably not going to be accessed, and just take up RAM. The paging system sees that a page hasn't been accessed for a long time, and swaps it out even if you have free RAM. This increases the amount of unused RAM, which is used for disk cache. Even with SSDs, RAM is a lot faster than drive access, so increasing the amount of RAM available for disk caching is beneficial.
If you disable swap, those memory pages that you never use will stay in RAM, and the size of your cache will be lower. And your system will run slower as a result.
To see the result of this, boot your system, then start the Task Manager and without doing anything, look at the used memory graph. With swap enabled, it will steadily decrease, because it pages out the memory you don't use. Memory that then gets used for disk caching where it makes a difference.

Finally, it is also used by shadow copies. If you don't have swap enabled, the shadow copies can't pre-commit a lock, and you have to wait for the disk to reserve an area. I.e. shadow copies are going to be slower. (Shadow copies are taken every time you install or uninstall something with the official Microsoft installer or InstallShield, or when you do a backup.)

So no, don't disable swap. Feel free to reduce it, but leave at least some swap enabled, or you actually slow down your system.

 

Excellent description and great knowledge.

The difficuly still lies with me that, as nobody that I know has been able to document any type of physical performance increase with pagefile on with an SSD, we are left with the pagefile only playng the part of telling you what went wrong if you have a crash. I haven't had a crash since the early days of Vista so it doesn't help at all and would suggest that most are in the same boat. Even on that same line, very few even know how to locate the dump file much less read it.

I would appreciate if you could find some form of proof that shows that Pagefile enabled on an SSD does in fact result in performance improvement.

Sorry if I am a bit direct but I have been through same in dozens of forums and its always best just to get to the heart of the matter rather than all the hypotheticals that will prevail.

 

Oscar, I know I'm not the first to say this, but bravo! for putting the time and trouble into compiling this guide - it is just awesome! I just purchased my first SONY Z - a Z11 refurb I got from cheetahdeals.com**(see below). I do have another notebook with an SSD and these are all universal, so they seem, and though by now I know a few of them, there are many I didn't know or weren't sure if they were cool with the Z and its RaidO array.

A rep pt for you, sir, and many thanks for the service. I'll save a few minor questions after I have implemented all of these, but for now, just one question:

Of all of your tips, what would you consider your top 3? If eliminating Pagefiles are not in the top 3 - or maybe even if they are - if you already have 8GB RAM, is it likely that pagefiles would ever be created?

Thanks again. See below for info about a great source of refurbed computers, from whom I just purchased my Z11 for $855!!

** Cheetahdeals.com, for those who have never heard of it, is a great, great American small business (about 700 people) in Syracuse NY that refurbs notebook PCs under contract from major mfrs; has exclusive for all Acer refurbs in US and does many others on nonexclusive basis. Just discovered them by accident and saw they had 5 Z11's i5-520, 4GB, 128 GB models for $899, less a 5% coupon making it $855 all-in - no tax, free shipping! Dealing with them has been a pleasure, the only small downside being that their administrative staff is pretty small, so you may have to wait to speak to someone. They give you 30 day full refund (no restocking fee) on all refurbs - what could be better? The wtty is pretty much industry std 90 day, which is backed by both Cheetah and the OEM. Personally, I think any refurb purchaser should add a mfrs extd wtty or third party, such as Square Trade

As to my experience so far, I received my Z11 in 2 days (went a whopping $20 for 2 day air!) and it arrived in perfect condition. I cannot find a single scratch or wear mark on it. It ran pretty much perfectly out of the box and so far I have not hit a snag, other than the limitations of the 128 GB SSD which begins life as a 110 GB drive and shrinks to 80 after the OS, software and the recovery partition which I might ditch, but it has saved my butt many times, so we'll see. I'm thinking of removing the DVD and putting in a 256 GB SSD I already own, or possibly just getting a fast Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB HDD and consider this 3.4 lb, $920 (with the Segate drive added) full-on DTR and ultra, ultra portable travelin machine about the best, luckiest deal I ever got. I'm getting 5-6 hrs batt life on "stamina" gpu and conservative settings, but wifi on all the time and 6-9 browser windows.

 

Thanks for the rep, always much appreciated.

My top 3, in no particular order:

-Enable Write Caching
-Disable indexing
-Turn Off the Disk Defragmenter Schedule
-Firefox - Use memory cache instead of disk cache
-Disable Hibernation
-Turn off Pagefile

Oops, I guess that's more than 3. Well I think any 3 of those are certainly worth doing.

In your last statement, if are you asking whether Windows would create a pagefile when 8GB of RAM is installed. The answer is that it does. By default it creates a pagefile equal to the amount of memory you have installed.

 

Thanks for listing more than 3 - I could never narrow things like that down, lol. I have implemented all of those recommendations, and a few others, except for disabling Hibernation. It's not that I need it for the faster startuup, the way you do with an HDD, but I find two advantages to it I'd rather not give up, unless I'm making some wrong assumptions:

1) I perceive that a hibernate shut down is faster than a total shutdown, but will consume less battery (ie, almost none) while down than a Sleep would

2) Likewise, booting back up, it not only appears to be a bit quicker, but far less meaningful than with an HDD, but it brings back all the open files, browser windows, etc, without having to manually restart them.

Are my assumptions correct, and if so, what is the downside of leaving Hibernate functionality intact? Is it mostly a matter of freeing up some SSD capacity? How much?

Finally, I was wondering if you know why the SONY 128 GB RAID0 SSDs lose more of their advertised capacity before a single file is loaded than any other I have seen. I find that there is more lost from advertised cpacity of 128 GB to 110 GB - 14% - compared to about 7% on almost every other SSD or HDD. Is it the RAID 0?

Thanks again for all.

Jeff

 

Hi Jeff,

I must argue one of the recommendations that Oscar2 gave. Going into these considerations, you should look at it like a new couch. Do you cover it in a protective plastic layer and refuse to sit on it, so it stays perfect... or... do you actually use it for its intended purpose and enjoy it?

There is no noticeable benefit to disabling drive indexing. The only fear people have about it is the amount of writes to the SSD. The indexing file is very small, less than 1% of my 80GB SSD, and cannot possibly write enough pieces of small data to leave noticeable wear on the SSD. My SSD 7mths old and the wearout indicator still has it at 100%. So, there is no proven upside to disabling drive indexing. Let's look at the downside to disabling it. Searching via your Start Menu specifically relies on the contents of your drive index. If you have it disabled, you cannot search by pressing the Windows key. It will never return results. I, personally, would rather to be able to type what I want rather than hold an irrational fear of wearing out my SSD.

Looking at hibernation... there is good reason to disable it. Each time you hibernate, the contents of your RAM are written to the drive so that the machine can enter a powered down state. Each time you hibernate, you do a large file write to your SSD. Again, you have to pick what benefits you want and what you can live with. You seem to have good reason to hibernate, but know that it takes the same amount of time to restore from hiberation as it does to simply power on your laptop with the SSD. Of course, hibernation will have all of your files open as they were.

The actual size of a 128GB SSD is 119GB, since they're marketed with the data factored at 1000, but the actual storage is in factors of 1024. Then, the recovery partition comes off the top. That's 8-14GB or so. The rest is for you to enjoy.

 

Thanks so much for those suggestions. Of the two, I am happy to put indexing back on, because I really use it a lot, but I was willing to sacrifice it if it would save a lot of wear and tear on my SSD. As for hibernation, if we are only talking about space on the SSD, I'll keep it in place until I find I'm near capacity - and by then I'm sure I'll either add another disk in the raid array or in place of the DVD drive.

That said, Oscar, do you wish to rebut? All in the spirit of intellectual discourse, please
Best,

Jeff

 

No, not at all. Anseio raises good points as always.

I would only point out that even without indexing, things are found reasonably quickly, so a good case can be made either way.

 

True, things are found very quickly... from explorer. I specifically address the issue that searches canot be performed via the Start Menu unless the item has been included in the index.