System Restore questions

When my brothers SSD got slower and slower a few years ago, I looked into it and found some sites claiming that System Restore doesn't play nice with SSDs, or maybe TRIM. I reinstalled W7 for him and turned off SR, and he never had any more issues with it.

This is the background for why I still turn off System Restore, even in W8.1. I realize that it might be fixed by now, but I just never looked into that again.

- Does System Restore work well with SSDs in W7 and W8.1?

 

Haven't heard of any real problems with System Restore using SSD's. BUT I have had problems with system restore using a normal hard drive with the following message: "Unable to complete system restore". I never could find out the reason but some have said that maybe it was the anti-virus program that was running.

 

As far as I know, there's no such relation between SSDs and System Restore. I even used it once on my unit...

 

The only reason why people advocated to disable system restore on SSDs is because it causes more writes. The ZOMG TOO MANY WRITES fear that people had never actually materialized itself. That fear of inducing too many writes has been mooted many times, with the latest one being techreport's SSD endurance test: http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead.

Usually, when a SSD slows down, it's either down to low free space along with a decent amount of data being written to the SSD, an issue with the SSD itself, à la 840 Evo or something going wrong with garbage collection.

It may not even be disabling system restore that fixed the issue for your brother, it might have more to do with reinstalling Windows fixing something else.

I've had system restore turned on all of my SSDs for years now and it has never caused me any issues.

 

I'm not sure how you know it's the only reason, I thought it was a Windows bug, but IDK...

 

Well, I'm not 100% sure, but the OS and the drive are mostly unaware of what each other are. Aside from certain SSD only commands that Windows knows to pass to the drive that is. As far as the SSD is concerned, system restore is just more data to be written, there's nothing different from writing different type of data to the drive as far as the controller on the SSD is concerned. The drive never knows what type of file/data Windows is telling it to write to memory and Windows doesn't know where the data is physically on the drive either. That's my reasoning as to why it's not a bug. Well, that and >3 years of using Windows with system restore turned on with 2 Windows 7 computers and 2-3 years with system restore turned on 3 Windows 8 computers.

The only thing I did back when I bought into the whole too many writes fear was limit the amount of space allocated to restore points, but that's it.

 

System restore on a SSD is fine. As mentioned it is just data, but it is just that. SSD's in general used to be very expensive and small in storage. To preserve storage capacity and lower writes a lot of users let system restore go and went for frequent external backups instead. With the larger drives and better write life system restore has gained new life.

It is also true some of the older SSD controllers actually benefited in performance by doing an occasional secure erase and system image placement.

 

Thank you for your help! The SSD I was talking about was a Crucial M4 that never was more than 60 % full.
(IIRC, the only bug this model had was random reboots after 5000 hours. I updated the firmware, so my brother never got any reboots.)