Superfetch and Prefetch on SSD -to disable or not?

Merlin5 · 7 Nov 2012 at 23:58

Seems to be mixed opinions on this. An optimisation guide I read on overclock.net suggests disabling fetch and that it can cause extra writes. Looking further into it, I found a post on an intel forum (third reply down) that says prefetch causes defrags to occur every 3 days which means additional writes.

http://communities.intel.com/thread/28771

With the nearly zero seek times of SSD's, is it better to free up RAM, disable fetch and reduce writes, or does it not matter one iota?

Grummkol · 8 Nov 2012 at 16:39

superfetch/prefetch were designed to overcome the shortcomings of mechanical drivers are disabled by default if you do a new windows 7 install on an SSD.
If you run something like intel SSD toolbox it will actually check that it's turned off and give you a warning if it isn't.

Merlin5 · 8 Nov 2012 at 17:43

Yeah I know all that. I would like to know if most people here tend to leave their fetch on or disable it, and if it causes additional writes, and if that's detrimental to the wear and tear of the SSD.

Broken Hope · 8 Nov 2012 at 18:04

Don't worry about writes with an SSD it will be obsolete before it reaches the write limit.

Phil2008 · 8 Nov 2012 at 20:58

Superfetch didnt get disabled when I installed win7 with a ssd, as its still caching stuff.. Anyway like you guys always say "unused memory is wasted memory", plus memory is still faster then ssd speeds, so superfech will still make windows perform better.