It might take some years from now on before most new computers will be shipped with Solid State Drives instead of conventional platter driven hard drives but the change is inevitable. SSDs of the current generation already achieve top read speeds but usually lack behind in write speeds. There are however a few tips on how to optimize Windows for Solid State Drive usage. All center around the idea of moving write intensive tasks to another hard drive or disabling them completely.
This is even more important if a Windows operating system has been installed on the Solid State Drive. (It is basically the same deal for Linux users who should think about moving all write intensive tasks to other drives)
Three different types of tweaks can be applied. Tweaks that are applied directly to the hardware device in Windows, tweaks to the Windows operating system and tweaks to applications.
Hardware Tweaks:
- PIO Mode
Make sure the SSD is not running in PIO mode. To verify that go into the Device Manager, open IDE ATA / ATAPI controllers and double-click all Primary and Secondary IDE Channels.
Verify that there are no signs of PIO Mode under the Current Transfer Mode entry in Advanced Settings. It should list Ultra DMA Mode 5 there.
- Enable Write Caching
Click on Disk Drives in the Device Manager and locate the Solid State Drive. Double-click it and open the Policies tab on top.
Select Optimize for performance and enable “Enable write caching on the disk”. There is no need for the quick removal option as the SSD will never be removed from the computer (like any other hard drive).
Windows Tweaks:
- Moving the Pagefile
Moving the pagefile to another hard drive has a positive effect on the performance of SSD drives.
Go back to System Properties. Click on the Advanced Tabm there on Settings under the Performance entry. Again on Advanced in the new window and finally on the Change button under the Virtual Memory entry.
The Virtual Memory window opens and it will display all drive partitions on top and the size of their paging files. Select the Solid State Drive and check the “No Paging File” entry. Click the Set button to set the new preferences.
Now select another hard drive and assign the pagefile to this drive.
- Move the temp files
The Advanced tab under System Properties has a button entitled Environment Variables. Click it and locate the temp and tmp variables for the user and the system. Change the path to another hard drive if they are located on the Solid State Drive.
- Disable the Indexing Service on the drive
Right-click on the drive letter of the SSD and select Properties from the menu. Locate the Allow Indexing Service to index the disk for fast file searching line and make sure it is disabled.
Application Tweaks:
Most application tweaks center around the idea of moving temporary files to another hard drive. Take the cache of web browsers or temp files during video production for example. Moving them to another hard drive will have an impact on the system’s performance.
Do you know of additional tweaks that might improve system performance of SSD drives?
Related posts:
Optimize Slow Solid State DrivesSolid State Hard Drives
Ridata introduces new Solid State Drives
SSD Security: Erase Solid State Drives Data
Solid State Drives Test Results
Speed up Hard Drives under Windows Vista
Should You Defragment A SSD?
Howto fix slow hard drives
6 Responses to “Optimize Windows For Solid State Drives Usage”
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[...] focusing on the Write cache, PIO and reallocate files that require intensive write operation, etc.. gHack has an excellent tutorial on [...]
See http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html for more about the ‘excessive writes wear out flash drives’ issue, which is mostly a myth at present. Basically you have to write evenly across whole SSD, as fast as possible and 24/7, to even have a chance of wearing it out, and it typically would take many years even with this unrealistic usage pattern.
You might have misunderstood the intention of the article. It’s not about the endurance of longevity of the SSDs but about system performance.
There’s nothing specific to SSDs here; all this is good advice to users with mechanical hard drives as well. Perhaps you should rename it?
Also, moving the temp folder and page file will increase an SSD’s longevity.
Also, if the hard drive you move things to is used a lot, you’d be better off leaving things on the SSD as it the better ones can read multiple sectors at once and buffer them for sending to the host.
I just load the OS on SSDs. Since the system run much faster on them. I also Ghost the SSDs so that when they fail, I just drop in another SSD. And since the OS is installed on the SSD, I don’t need to do all these tweaks either – it’s defaulted. Often used programs are installed on another SSD and all others, including data directories are installed on SATA drives.
LethAL, I’m quoting Marin here, “you reach the limit in about 50 years on a 64 GB drive and continuous never ending writes to the disk. Check this article http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html” (http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/03/should-you-defragment-a-ssd/), so is longevity more particularly worth being taken into consideration on SSDs or not?