Windows SSD : Superfetch, prefetch and drive indexing

Craig321 · 11 Feb 2012 at 11:16

MilanoChris said:
I've always wondered, what is the difference between sleep and hibernate?

Sleep suspends to RAM, hibernate suspends to disk (hybrid sleep does both)

So if you have a power cut and you've hibernated you can boot back up into the machine's previous state whereas with sleep you would lose whatever you had running/open.

Sleep is far quicker.

Subliminal Aura said:
Why switch them off if these services are mostly idle ?

File indexing - yes I can relate to this but Superfetch and prefetch too ?

Windows 7 is very good at SSD optimization. As far as I know it automatically disables superfetch/prefetch for content on the SSD and leaves it enabled to work with whatever you have installed on your HDDs.

I say leave everything default providing you initially installed Windows 7 on an SSD. The only thing I did was switch of indexing on the C:\ drive, my data is on D:\ so it's unnecessary on the SSD.

ChrisD. · 11 Feb 2012 at 11:21

Craig321 said:
Sleep suspends to RAM, hibernate suspends to disk (hybrid sleep does both)

So if you have a power cut and you've hibernated you can boot back up into the machine's previous state whereas with sleep you would lose whatever you had running/open.

Sleep is far quicker.

Thanks.

What do MacBooks do? Sleep I presume?

Craig321 · 11 Feb 2012 at 11:22

MilanoChris said:
Thanks.

What do MacBooks do? Sleep I presume?

I think they sleep, then hibernate when they run out of battery. I may be wrong though.

NathanE · 11 Feb 2012 at 11:41

moogle said:
Sleep uses no space? It's hibernate that does.

Not true. Hybrid sleep (which is the default since Vista) consists of both a traditional sleep (suspend to RAM) *and* a traditional hibernate (suspend to HDD).

The way it works is:

1. It performs a "fake" sleep by putting the screen into power saving mode (i.e. off)

2. Whilst in this "fake" sleep, it is writing out the hibernate file to disk.

3. When the above is complete, it performs a traditional sleep (suspend to RAM).

4. If the user wants the machine to wake up, it will resume instantly from RAM. If however the power supply to the machine was cut, the system will perform POST and notice the outstanding hibernate file and then resume from that.

Hybrid sleep. Making Windows better than others OSes since 2006.

moogle · 11 Feb 2012 at 11:45

Ah well I know that, hybrid sleep <> sleep which is what I was replying to.

I rarely use hybrid sleep either. I know I should but we rarely have powercuts here. My PC has maybe shut off 2 times in the last 7 years?

NathanE · 11 Feb 2012 at 13:05

If you press Start->Sleep then you're using Hybrid Sleep. Unless you've dug around in the Power section of Control Panel to explicitly turn it off, it's quite hard to find too...

moogle · 11 Feb 2012 at 13:45

Yeah I turned mine off, I disabled hibernate only so it doesn't appear in the power settings.

mrk · 11 Feb 2012 at 16:35

mrk · 11 Feb 2012 at 16:42

Superfetch stays on, it's very much a needed and useful feature of 7 SSD or not. Prefetch though stays off.

moogle said:
Yeah I turned mine off, I disabled hibernate only so it doesn't appear in the power settings.

Edit*

When I cloned my HDD to SSD I disabled the following manually:

- Prefetch (registry)
- BootTrace (registry)
- Indexing
- Hibernation (I use Sleep as above!)
- System Restore
- Scheduled Defrag (although this auto ignores SSD drives anyway)

Can't remember if there was anything else but that was the bulk of it.

Davefran · 11 Feb 2012 at 16:46

groen said:
inside windows 7 power management adavanced options there is an option for hard drive sleep. It reduces the power to the hard drive after X amount of time. I think it is advised to disable this feature. I disabled this feature because it was causing problems with my sata drives and read on forums that it is recommended to not use sleep with ssd. turning off your monitor after X amount of time is ok but i would not go in to hibernation mode or anything like that with ssd. I think it can cause problems.

madindehead said:
It doesn't cause problems.

People just disable sleep on SSDs because really, what's the point. The boot is almost as fast as recovery from sleep, except sleep uses a lot of drive space.

This adjustment allows the SSD's idle garbage collection to operate, even when you're not in front of your computer

moogle · 11 Feb 2012 at 16:56

mrk said:
When I cloned my HDD to SSD I disabled the following manually:

- Prefetch (registry)
- BootTrace (registry)
- Indexing
- Hibernation (I use Sleep as above!)
- System Restore
- Scheduled Defrag (although this auto ignores SSD drives anyway)

Can't remember if there was anything else but that was the bulk of it.

I did a fresh install (my install was 2 years old anyway

) and used junction links.

I moved:

C:\Users\
C:\ProgramData\
C:\Windows\Prefetch\
C:\Windows\Temp\

all to a hidden folder on my D:\ drive.

The only things that write to the SSD now is program installs and updates. I always have firefox open and it is continuously writing 100-200KB/s and when watching something on YouTube or any other flash player it'll write to the %temp% folder.

At this rate this SSD will last me a loooooong time

Just googling what boot trace is though I haven't heard of that.

madindehead · 12 Feb 2012 at 00:56

Moving ProgramData really slows down the boot btw. Trust me, I know.

moogle · 12 Feb 2012 at 01:05

madindehead said:
Moving ProgramData really slows down the boot btw. Trust me, I know.

Haven't noticed any difference, still pretty fast to boot up.

Copy this and save it as bootspeed.vbs

When you can close all programs and run it to see what restart time you get (it'll just time how long it takes your PC to restart)

If you don't have autologin then it'll add a little bit more time.

BIOS options and drives installed will affect the time too (FWIW I have 3 drives set)

I've got 35s.

Code:

Option Explicit
On Error Resume Next
Dim Wsh, Time1, Time2, Result, PathFile, MsgResult, MsgA, AppName, KeyA, KeyB, TimeDiff
MsgA = "Please close all running applications and click on OK."
KeyA = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\RestartTime\"
KeyB = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\RestartTime"
AppName = "ReBoot-Time"
Set Wsh = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
PathFile = """" & WScript.ScriptFullName & """"
Result = wsh.RegRead(KeyA & "Times")
if Result = "" then
MsgResult = Msgbox (MsgA, vbOKCancel, AppName)
If MsgResult = vbcancel then WScript.Quit
Wsh.RegWrite KeyA & "Times", left(Time,8), "REG_SZ"
Wsh.RegWrite KeyB, PathFile, "REG_SZ"
Wsh.Run "cmd /c Shutdown -r -t 00", false, 0 
else
Wsh.RegDelete KeyA & "Times"
Wsh.RegDelete KeyA
Wsh.RegDelete KeyB
TimeDiff = DateDiff("s",Result,left(Time,8))
MsgBox "Your computer reboots in " & TimeDiff & " seconds", VbInformation, AppName
end if
wscript.Quit

If it gets really slow I'll defrag the D:\ drive and put the system folder at the start of the drive for max speed. If that doesn't help then I'd move programdata back.

I don't know why I moved it I haven't seen many writes to the directory so far.

madindehead · 12 Feb 2012 at 01:52

Well, from my experience moving ProgramData really slowed down my boot. Certainly from what I noticed. Unless it was the movement of the Users directory and I blamed it on ProgramData.

linktoinsanity · 12 Feb 2012 at 09:15

NathanE said:
Not true. Hybrid sleep (which is the default since Vista) consists of both a traditional sleep (suspend to RAM) *and* a traditional hibernate (suspend to HDD).

The way it works is:

1. It performs a "fake" sleep by putting the screen into power saving mode (i.e. off)

2. Whilst in this "fake" sleep, it is writing out the hibernate file to disk.

3. When the above is complete, it performs a traditional sleep (suspend to RAM).

4. If the user wants the machine to wake up, it will resume instantly from RAM. If however the power supply to the machine was cut, the system will perform POST and notice the outstanding hibernate file and then resume from that.

Hybrid sleep. Making Windows better than others OSes since 2006.

Nice explanation. I've been wondering why my computer resume windows when the power is cut during a "sleep."

Thanks.

NathanE · 12 Feb 2012 at 11:48

Davefran said:
This adjustment allows the SSD's idle garbage collection to operate, even when you're not in front of your computer

Considering an SSD contains nothing that can actually be "put to sleep" anyway what makes anyone think an SSD does anything with the command from the OS "please go to sleep"?

An SSD probably doesn't even expose sleep as being one of its "P&P Power Management Capabilities" to the OS.

And if the SSD does, it probably uses this as an explicit hint to start performing its own bespoke maintenance tasks (such as garbage collection).

Azuse05 · 12 Feb 2012 at 12:11

Why do people insist on as much unnecessary and frankly ignorant "tinkering" when using an os that's known for just working. Correct services are configured automatically when installing. Moving you're random access (temp/prefetch) files off an ssd to make it last longer just means you should have bought a normal hard drive instead of something specifically created to improve performance of those files. Not to mention makes people wonder if you ever even bothered to find out how many GB per day they're designed to write for the next 10 years...

Download sp1 integrated iso, install windows on ssd. Leave it alone.

Craig321 · 12 Feb 2012 at 13:03

Azuse05 said:
Why do people insist on as much unnecessary and frankly ignorant "tinkering" when using an os that's known for just working. Correct services are configured automatically when installing. Moving you're random access (temp/prefetch) files off an ssd to make it last longer just means you should have bought a normal hard drive instead of something specifically created to improve performance of those files. Not to mention makes people wonder if you ever even bothered to find out how many GB per day they're designed to write for the next 10 years...

Download sp1 integrated iso, install windows on ssd. Leave it alone.

Is there anything additional that Windows 7 SP1 does over stock Windows 7 when installing to an SSD?

mrk · 12 Feb 2012 at 13:15

moogle said:
I did a fresh install (my install was 2 years old anyway ) and used junction links.

I moved:

C:\Users\
C:\ProgramData\
C:\Windows\Prefetch\
C:\Windows\Temp\

all to a hidden folder on my D:\ drive.

The only things that write to the SSD now is program installs and updates. I always have firefox open and it is continuously writing 100-200KB/s and when watching something on YouTube or any other flash player it'll write to the %temp% folder.

At this rate this SSD will last me a loooooong time

Just googling what boot trace is though I haven't heard of that.

I don't think that matters that much. Since I installed and cloned over my HDD to SSD (Force 3 120GB) back in November the OS has written 922GB of data and read 2.44TB off it. SSDLife still estimates the life expectancy based on this to be 8yrs and 11months.

Subliminal Aura · 12 Feb 2012 at 13:17

mrk said:
I don't think that matters that much. Since I installed and cloned over my HDD to SSD (Force 3 120GB) back in November the OS has written 922GB of data and read 2.44TB off it. SSDLife still estimates the life expectancy based on this to be 8yrs and 11months.

+1

If you're going to faff around with moving windows temp and user temp then what's the point of having an SSD