SSD = higher memory usage?

Yosiah · 23 Dec 2011 at 13:42

I reinstalled windows 7 on a new SSD - now the only drive in my case, but I've noticed that windows 7 now uses 25% of my 4GB ram, whereas before it used to use 18%.

Do SSDs increase the ram usage? I was told to disable prefetching and superfetching, and they say they are disabled in the registry (0, instead of 3 modifiers).

Also, Ctrl Shift Escape shows a lot of cached memory... isn't that supposed to be zero now?

Sorry I'm a noob with this

Yosiah · 23 Dec 2011 at 13:53

Also, my degrag window has the SSD in the List (it's my C drive; my only drive) and this weird Volume string...

Is it not properly detecting it as an SSD? I was told windows should remove it from here after Windows Experience Index is done etc.

Justintime · 23 Dec 2011 at 14:17

You don't have another hdd there? Also, don't defragment an SSD. As for mem usage, this can vary a lot depending on what the OS is doing at the time, nothing to do with the SSD.

Yosiah · 23 Dec 2011 at 14:27

The only drive I have in the PC at the moment is a 120 GB Force 3 SSD, and I'm still waiting for my Samsung F3 to be delivered from another store.

I thought if windows properly detected your SSD, it wasn't supposed to show in the Defragment List, and Prefecth and Superfetch are supposed to be automatically disabled by windows after you run the Windows Experience Index, but they haven't been.

weird_dave · 24 Dec 2011 at 14:02

It will still show in the list. Note that there's no schedule and it's never run it.
If you click on configure schedule then select disks, it shouldn't show up (with no other disks in the system it may not get that far).

Orcvader · 24 Dec 2011 at 14:16

Since you've disabled prefetch and superfetch, the system can't use the SSD to pagefile anymore. Hence the higher RAM usage as all cache can only be held on the RAM now.

The SSD will still appear in the defrag list, but Windows has automatically detected it's an SSD, hence the "Never run" message in the "Last run" column.

Personally I would turn the pagefiling back on. It hardly affects SSD life now anyway, and in my view one on the main reasons to have an SSD. Plus some very old software I have demands pagefiling to be on. You can change the size of it anyway, but I left mine on default size, and my SSD still has about 8 years of life kicking in it.

weird_dave · 26 Dec 2011 at 15:11

Prefetch and Superfetch have nothing to do with the pagefile

In fact, turning them on can increase memory cache usage by fetching data that may not get used. It will also cause boot times to increase by loading this data.