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SSD Settings

splitcoldsplitcold Member Posts: 73

So I just got a new SSD today and installed windows 7 64 bit. Are there any settings you guys would advise I change to increase performance or to extend the life of the SSD.

 

Thanks

Comments

  • mmoskimmoski Member UncommonPosts: 282

    Turn off defragging on that SSD if you haven't done so yet.

  • splitcoldsplitcold Member Posts: 73
    Yup turned off defraging, indexing, pagefile, hibernation, system restore, and made sure AHCI was on in the bios.
  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347

    Other than turning off defragmentation, all you really need to do with an SSD is to decide intelligently what should go on an SSD and what shouldn't.

    Turn your page file back on.  Unless you've got 16 GB of system memory or so with no plausible use for half that much, turning off your page file does more harm than good.

  • levin70levin70 Member Posts: 87

    google is your friend.  do a search for "ssd optimization" and follow the guides.  You will be looking at the following:

     

    1)  turn off superfetch and prefetch.

    2)  make sure your bios is enabled to AHCI and make sure that windows recognizes and has the SSD in AHCI mode

    3)  turn off the swap file

    4)  turn off defrag as noted above

    5)  make sure trim support is enabled

     

    becareful when doing anything in regedit.  a slip could easily result in needed to restore from a backup or re-install windows

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347

    Once again, turning off the swap file is completely stupid for most purposes.  If you have to ask, then you shouldn't do it.

    There are some things that have to nominally be in system memory, but aren't likely to actually be accessed.  So Windows says fine, we'll just stick them in the swap file, and if they actually get used, we'll create space in system memory for them.  If you turn off the swap file, then you have to have physical system memory used by things like programs that claim that they need a bunch of space for something or other, but haven't actually used that space.  That leaves less room for things that will actively use system memory.

    And then there's the question of what happens if you run out of memory.  The reason the swap file exists in the first place is to make sure that, if you run out of physical system memory, Windows can grab something that isn't being used and stick it on the hard drive instead, while pretending it's still in memory.  If you disable the swap file, then you're telling Windows that it's not allowed to do that, and the alternative is that if your memory needs go a single byte over the amount of physical system memory that you have (including things where memory has been allocated but not actually used), Windows should just crash instead.  If you're so paranoid about a few extraneous writes to your SSD that you'd rather have Windows crash entirely, you're doing it wrong.

    -----

    Turning off prefetching is a bad idea, too, though here, it at least doesn't matter that much.  SSDs are very fast as compared to hard drives, but they're very slow compared to system memory.  System memory is faster than a good SSD by about two orders of magnitude in bandwidth, and three orders of magnitude in latency.

    The idea of prefetching is that, if the computer is idle, Windows will try to guess what you'll load into memory next, and it will load it into memory ahead of time for you.  If it guesses wrong and you launch some other program instead, then it simply dumps the data it had prefetched to make room for what you actually want, and no harm is done.  If it guesses right, then whatever you wanted to load is already available in memory, which speeds things up, even with an SSD.

    Prefetching involves writes to system memory, but only reads and not writes from the SSD.  Reads don't put meaningful wear and tear on an SSD.  If you never write any new data to an SSD, you could constantly read from it all day for years and it wouldn't matter.  So turning off prefetching doesn't extend the life of your SSD.  It just makes your system slower.

    Actually, there are probably a few writes to the SSD to keep track of what programs you've tended to use in the past, as a predictor of what you're likely to use in the future.  But that's inconsequential from a wear and tear perspective.

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

    Google is full of bad advice.

    Make sure auto-defrag is turned off (it should be), and with Win7 your set. AHCI mode is good advice, but it can be tricky to accomplish (if you just flip the BIOS setting, Windows will stop booting - there is a work around that's not hard).

    If you are ~really~ worried you can move your swap file to a standard hard drive, as the only reason that people recommend turning it off is to prolong your SSD life since they do have limited number of write cycles. SSDs are designed to handle that kind of thing though - and may computers (such as laptops) only have an SSD, and they don't break or go up in flames with a swap file turned on. You may save... 3 days of life out of an average lifespan of 3-5 years. But I wouldn't disable the swap file entirely. That will do more harm than good.

    Other tweaks listed on the internet may get you better HDD benchmark scores in specific hard drive tests, but often at the expense of overall computer speed. Some of them may help XP/Vista, since they don't have the greatest low-level support for SSDs, but it's a real crap shoot, and what works well with one drive brand/firmware may not work well for another.

  • OnomicOnomic Member Posts: 196

    http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html

    That is a 15 step guide, i dont know much myself so i used that guide.

  • Agricola1Agricola1 Member UncommonPosts: 4,977
    WIN 7 detected my SSD and just optmized itself for it, turning off the de frag. So I just let it do it's thing and left it at that. Atleast that's what my decrepit memory recalls!

    "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"

    CS Lewis

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