The SSD setup/performance guide

David-Stephens

David-Stephens

David-Stephens

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18 Sep 2008
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*WORK IN PROGRESS, bassed on my personal computer experience and my purcahse of a 64gb m255 Crucial SSD and windows 7*

Introduction:

If your reading this you are most likely in the thought process of buying an SSD or someone who has already taken the plunge into these wonderful devices. Like many other users you are wondering about these huge worries about drive life, read write performance, optimization and the like. In order to get the best out of your SSD there are a few settings that can be altered an changed.

Rest easy however SSDs are much faster than HDD (including 10,000RPM drives) and thus the real world performance is not massivly effected by these minor tweaks. But your on OcUK forums, therefore benches and pushing hardware to the limit is part and parcel, therefore on with the guide

Which SSD?:

Through research the current (oct 29th 2009) best drives for price/performance are the Crucial m255 series and the Intel x25-Mainstream. These come in sizes from 64gb to 256gb and soon to be over 300 if intel get these drives released.

What drives to look for have been covered in other threads and may be included in this thread at a later date, regardless for gaming performance any of the crucial or intel x25-ms are going to fit the bill

*But the prices are crazy!!!*

Apple just bought all the worlds NAND flash, deal with it
Windows just released there largest software update ever
The Global economy means that the £ to $ is variable at the current time

These are three events we can't control, sit tight and the price will come down

Setup:

So you ordered the SSD its nice and shiny and you want to set it up. Some people will tell you that you need a 3.5" to 2.5" drive bay converter, and this is true to some extent. In reality the SSD is so light and so small that it is perfectly fine to sit loose in your case. I have seen sticky tape use and my SSD sits on top of my HDD, its location does not matter.

1. Refer to your MOBO manual for the best sata port to use. Really, just plug it into slot 1
2. Disconnect all other sata storage devices
3. Boot up pc go to MOBO bios and set the storage to ACHI
4. Insert OS disk

Windows 7

1. Install now and select keyboard and language
2. When it comes to install method select CUSTOM INSTALL

*THIS IS A DISK FORMAT OPTION BACK UP ALL DATA* - just encase :P

3. Install should now take place, the PC will restart a few times, if your boot priority is CD first then ignore the boot from CD option and let the setup continue
4. Congrats your OS should now be installed

Windows 7 (applies to vista) - Performance tweaks

Virtual Memory -
Some swear by this method, others say avoid at all costs. In the case of 4gb on vista 64 bit I disabled my VM

Defragment -
Start > Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services
Locate Disk Defragmenter and stop this service.
Alternatively should you have HDD as well Computer > "Properties" of any drive > Tools > Defragment Now
This brings up the overview where you can set scheduling and when certain drives should be Defragmented. For the SSD go ahead and change it to never, go the the schedule and click off "Run on a schedule"

Superfetch
Start > Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services
Properties > Disable

Windows Search
Start > Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services
Properties disable
You can still use task bar search ect with this disabled. We disable this to improve SSD performance

TRIM - is it even on?

If you run an administrative command prompt and type:
fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify
if it returns 0 then it is on in Windows

TRIM will only work with drives that have firmware that supports it and will only work on RAID configurations where the controller supports it. Right now the latest drivers for your AHCI controller should be by intel (assuming intel mobo) and this will allow trim to work

Device manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Find your AHCI controller > go to its properties and update the driver

System restore

This is the only performance tweak i have not done. It simply is to turn of System restore on your SSD. Anyone with an SSD should have a backup drive of some description and should meticulously backup data as this is still new tech and driver updates don't always spell good news

*UNFINISHED (the next step of the guide i am currently doing on my pc, check back for details)***
 
My understanding was that Win7 should detect the SSD, and if it's good enough disable defrag,superfetch,pre-fetch. Certainly that is what I read on the Win7 blog.
 
Done most of those already, found them rooting around various sites haha. But its still a pretty handy guide and will be much easier having it all in one place! Nice work :)

But yea, as others have said, superfetch was still on when I installed Win7. Defrag was disabled though, so it must kinda know its an SSD :p
 
Useful information and good timing, all my new bits are sat at home waiting for me to finish work :D thank you for this, could do witha comprehensive list of to dos when it comes to flashing the drives too though!!
 
cheers for this but i have a question when i go to use the trim on my crucial 65gb sdd it is now really slow when like before it was done in a minute or so?

is this normal then also i cant use anything else as it just locks up or is really laggy something not right could someone tell me what i have missed or need to do
 
rick fowler said:
cheers for this but i have a question when i go to use the trim on my crucial 65gb sdd it is now really slow when like before it was done in a minute or so?

is this normal then also i cant use anything else as it just locks up or is really laggy something not right could someone tell me what i have missed or need to do
Click to expand...

If you mean wiper rather than trim (trim works in the background all the time and you don;t notice it) then you must run wiper in IDE hard drive mode.

Mine on IDE will take a minute or less. With my hard drive set to RAID in bios (I have a raid array) then it will take almost all night!

So I boot, go to bios and set ssd drive to IDE, boot into windows, run wiper, reboot, reset bios setting back to RAID (or whatever it was on).
 
yeah sorry im still new to these seems a bit of a ball ache to do it like that then,i hope they bring out something better to run it.

cheers
 
rick fowler said:
yeah sorry im still new to these seems a bit of a ball ache to do it like that then,i hope they bring out something better to run it.

cheers
Click to expand...

I think they will get it sorted in the end. It's not really that big of a deal and it's not like your running it every day. Once a month would do.

So either leave it running for hours on slow mode or do the quicker reboot method and it's done in under 5 minutes.
 
titaniumx3 said:
When you format an SSD, is safe to do a quick format or full format?
Click to expand...

Best to use sanitary erase, restores the drive to factory state afaik.

I guess you could just format and then run wiper later on after you have installed your O/S but i prefer the former.
 
Toekiller said:
Not on mine. Superfetch was on.
Click to expand...
Do you have other HDD's in the system? In which case my understanding is that Superfetch will be on, but only will be Superfecting from the mechanical drives. The SSD (if it meets performance criteria) won't be superfetched, defragged, nor pre-fetched.
 
in most cases superfetch is used on the mechanical drve to aid the loading of frequently used programs and to predict what would be opened, the read speed and access time means the feature is not worth it on an ssd and to turn it off will not affect the performance because of where your most used apps are

on your shiny new SSD

(working on revisions to the guide to include safty guid as well as performance guide)
 
I have been told by a Corsair guy on their forums to do only a quick format and also set X32 to 32KB allocation size. Not sure whether the latter scales with size of drive
 
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