Best SSD and Windows 7 Optimization Guide

MoRT489

MoRT489

MoRT489

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Hi guys, i've just got my first SSD and have been through the 8 pages of this section! There are a couple of guides linked but surprised there wasnt a sticky actually. Can someone experienced in SSD recommend a guide plz?

Also, there seem to be conflicting arguments for leaving superfetch and prefecth on :confused:
 
Had my SSD for just over a month and I’ve found the best source of information to be the manufacturer forum (OCZ). Have you had a look to see if your SSD manufacturer has a forum?
 
I followed this....

Increase System Speed
Disable indexing
Description: Indexing creates and maintains a database of file attributes. This can lead to multiple small writes when creating/deleting/modifying files. Searching for files will still work.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Services - > Right-Click Windows Search -> Startup type: Disabled -> OK

Disable defragmentation
Description: Defragmenting a hard disk's used space is only useful on mechanical disks with multi-millisecond latencies. Free-space defragmentation may be useful to SSDs, but this feature is not available in the default Windows Defragmenter.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Services - > Right-Click Disk Defragmenter -> Startup type: Disabled -> OK

Disable Write Caching
Description: There is no cache on the SSD, so there are no benefits to write caching. There are conflicting reports on whether this gains speed or not.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Manage -> Device Manager -> Disk drives -> Right-Click STEC PATA -> Properties -> Policies Tab -> Uncheck Enable write caching -> OK

Configure Superfetch
Description: Frees up RAM by not preloading program files.
Instructions: On second glance, I would recommend leaving this one alone. However, there are some customizations that you can follow in the post below.

Firefox - Use memory cache instead of disk cache
Description: If you use Firefox, there's a way to write cached files to RAM instead of the hard disk. This is not only faster, but will significantly reduce writes to the SSD while using the browser.
Instructions: Open Firefox -> Type about:config into the address bar -> Enter -> double-click browser.cache.disk.enable to set the value to False -> Right-Click anywhere -> New -> Integer -> Preference Name "disk.cache.memory.capacity" -> value memory size in KB. Enter 32768 for 32MB, 65536 for 64MB, 131072 for 128MB, etc. -> restart Firefox

Free up extra drive space
Disable the Page File
Description: Eliminate writing memory to the SSD, free over 2GB of disk space. Warning - If you run out of memory the program you're using will crash.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Settings (Performance) -> Advanced Tab -> Change -> Uncheck Automatically manage -> No paging file -> Set -> OK -> Restart your computer
Alternatively, if you want to play it safer, you can set a custom size of 200MB min and max.

Disable System Restore
Description: Don't write backup copies of files when installing new programs or making system changes. Can free up between a few hundred MB to a couple GB. Warning - Although unlikely, if a driver installation corrupts your system, there won't be an automatic way to recover.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> System Protection Tab -> Configure -> Turn off system protection -> Delete -> OK

Disable Hibernate
Description: You may free up 1GB of space on the SSD if you have 1GB of memory, 2GB of space if you have 2GB memory. You will lose the hibernation feature which allows the equivalent of quick boots and shutdowns.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Type cmd -> Right-Click the cmd Icon -> Run as Administrator -> Type powercfg -h off -> Type exit

Taken from here

http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/win...-ultimate-solid-state-drive-speed-tweaks.html
 
Superfetch needlessly uses memory, theres just entirely no need for it when access time is essentially instant, prefetch, is mores aggressive in choosing what to prefetch and really just goes after what you use the absolute most without needless constant access of superfetch.

Most people disable both, some leave prefetch on, check defrag is certainly off(at least for any ssd's in the system) and indexing off, as it will constantly keep a list of files updated when its just not required and writes quite a lot of data, those are your key 4 things to keep a look out for.

If you disable hiberation you can save anything from 2-4gb on the file windows will keep for it, you can disable pagefile and save another 4gb if you are very tight on space, its arguable how much its needed, you could keep a much smaller pagefile as a few apps expect it and are badly programmed and won't work without it, though theres not many of them anymore.

Thats about it, as Sharpedge said, check the ocz forums, though the best guides are in the Vertex subforum, not the Vertex 2 forum which is newer and lacks the guides for optimising windows.

You can always just open task manager, click the view heading under the processes tab and enable i/o reads and writes, if anything is going nuts, look into what it is, if its necessary and if you can kill it without harming anything. Some apps go banana's and write data constantly, some you need, some you won't.

Most optimisation for SSD's is about limiting writes, because a heavily writen to drive is slower than a cleaner drive and the less writing being done the longer the drive will last(though in reality a heavily used drive is still predicted to last 5 years + its more a case of no one quite knows how long they'll last in real world usage.

I also do basic things like, downloading everything to a mechanical hdd, downloading all big files and all programs that do downloading for you, install them to a mechanical hdd and make sure all the data/temp folders for those programs are on mechanical hdd's so if you download a few to a few hundred gigs of data a day/week/month they aren't writen to the ssd.
 
Do you have any advice about antivirus/security packages too drunkenmaster?

As when I checked Norton 2009 it kept doing lots of small writes when I used Microsoft's procmon tool (I think, as it was a long time).

Just interested to know if you use an antivirus package and noticed this trend.
 
Just loaded into disk management to format the SSD with NTFS, but get the following message...which do i choose?

Format1.jpg
 
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