Thanks DragonQ!
I had some mates telling me that the pagefile, temp files and Cashes should be moved onto other drives due to wear on the drive. After your help I started looking for more info on this to show to them, I found this from Microsoft;
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx
Some extracts;
"Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD."
"Does Write Caching make sense on SSDs and does Windows 7 do anything special if an SSD supports write caching?
Some SSD manufacturers including RAM in their devices for more than just their control logic; they are mimicking the behavior of traditional disks by caching writes, and possibly reads. For devices that do cache writes in volatile memory, Windows 7 expects flush commands and write-ordering to be preserved to at least the same degree as traditional rotating disks. Additionally, Windows 7 expects user settings that disable write caching to be honored by write caching SSDs just as they are on traditional disks."
"Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?
Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.
The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.
Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?
Yes, for most systems with SSDs.
If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.
Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.
Is NTFS Compression of Files and Directories recommended on SSDs?
Compressing files help save space, but the effort of compressing and decompressing requires extra CPU cycles and therefore power on mobile systems. That said, for infrequently modified directories and files, compression is a fine way to conserve valuable SSD space and can be a good tradeoff if space is truly a premium.
We do not, however, recommend compressing files or directories that will be written to with great frequency. Your Documents directory and files are likely to be fine, but temporary internet directories or mail folder directories aren’t such a good idea because they get large number of file writes in bursts. "
Interesting reading if nothing else.
