Comments on: Optimize Windows For Solid State Drives Usage

By: blah blah

blah blah — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:50:43 +0000

You can ignore most of this with a modern SSD on Win 7. Here’s the thing. A lot of folks waited for SSD’s to standardize a bit, and the technology to become more reliable / less expensive. Once it did, more folks adopted it. However, geeks being geeks, they started looking online to squeeze more performance out of their SSD’s. That’s when they came across old articles talking about farming page files, temp files/folders, etc off onto other drives / ramdisks, etc. But most of this stuff is seriously outdated (yes, after only a year or two), b/c SSD’s have matured fairly fast. Most SSD’s are designed to last 5+ years, even with tons of writes (the writes being what wear them out the most). By pawning page files, temp files/folders, caches, etc off onto slower HDD’s, your basically negating the speed advantage of the SSD. You now have a program (eg: web browser) loading from SSD quickly, but then bottlenecking speeds with page files and caches on HDD’s. It’s like getting a fast car so you can fly down the highway quickly, but you baby it by driving down residential streets so you don’t wear it out. It’s back-asswards. Likewise, Win 7 (SP1 by now) is good at detecting an SSD, and automatically avoiding defrags on it, setting it up with max possible DMA, disabling superfetch on it, etc, etc. You can double-check all those settings if you like, but you’ll most likely find it’s a-ok. If you really, really want to feel like a geek, setting up a ramdisk to toss temp files on can make you feel pretty techy. But even that can back-fire. Some folks are doing ramdisks with only 4gb of ram in their box. Win 64 is a big jump in ram consumption vs. Win 32. Really, unless you’re using like 10+ gb of ram, making a ram disk is just removing ram from your memory pool which would be better used as *shock* memory! If making ramdisks for SSD’s was a great idea, Microsoft would have coded in a utility to automatically do so if it detected an SSD. Bottomline, stop worrying about your SSD. Install it, make sure the firmware is up-to-date (the main reason people find them not working and RMA is b/c they don’t update the darn firmware), and just enjoy it.

By: Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 08:57:01 +0000

The issue are writes. SSD are slow when it comes to writing, one therefor tries to minimize the write operations on said drives. Another reason is wear. While that’s not a big issue anymore with recent SSD, older solid state drives had only a limited number of writes per cell which would reduce the overall capacity of the drive in the long run.

By: Kyle S

Kyle S — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:01:17 +0000

Why does the Page File and Indexing have issues with SSD’s? thanks

By: iMacker

iMacker — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 19:01:40 +0000

Before installing your new SSD make sure to use this guide and optimization tips http://surreystore.com/Forums/tech-reviews/the-ssd-optimization-guide/

By: Ten98

Ten98 — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:37:38 +0000

On modern SSDs with fast controllers (Indilinx, Sandforce, Samsung, Intel) you should not move the pagefile or temp files away from the SSD to a mechanical hard drive, this will massively reduce performance.

By: Ten98

Ten98 — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:16:29 +0000

Most SSDs are rated for 10’000 write cycles.

Since modern firmwares use wear-levelling technology to evenly write across all of the cells you have to write the entire drive to cycle it once.

So in a “heavy use small drive” scenario, lets say I have a 50gb SSD and write an average of 10gb per day to the drive it will take me 5 days to completely write cycle the drive

so if the drive wears out at 10’000 cycles it will take 50’000 days for it to fail, or 136 years…

Obviously if my drive is bigger or I write less data than that the number of years before it fails goes up.

By: Ted Stewart

Ted Stewart — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 03:36:25 +0000

This is well after the fact, but it’s worth mentioning that SATA/PATA and IDE are very different things. IDE and PIO are protocols the computer uses to communicate with the drive. PATA and SATA are how the data is physically transmitted over the wires. The industry frequently and incorrectly refers to PATA drives as IDE, when IDE is used by both PATA and SATA drives.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:48:58 +0000

“Why mention PIO mode? Honestly, who uses IDE SSDs? Do they even exist?”

Actually all SATA drives are still listed under this controller type. I do not know the exact specifics, but all drives basically emulate this interface to Windows. In fact, the full-name in Windows 7 for the grouping in Device Manager is “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.” (Note the inclusion of “ATA/ATAPI” controllers.)

But most importantly, go to this category in Device Manager and check every node under it – you will see that the SATA controllers still have DMA/PIO options, command queuing, etc…I fix many computers and I have often found that people forget this simply because they do not check, thinking it does not apply.

In fact, PIO mode is *terrible* …Unfortunately windows “falls back” to this transfer mode if there is a driver problem etc and will not automatically switch back to DMA once the driver problems are solved.

Thus this is a very important thing to mention…for *any* HardDrive.

By: Erik

Erik — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 02:51:34 +0000

Why mention PIO mode? Honestly, who uses IDE SSDs? Do they even exist?

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:29:39 +0000

It reduces the read and write operations on the drive with the write operations being the ones that slow down the performance the most. Please note that this guide has been written largely for first and some second generation SSDs that do not support trim or garbage collection.

By: TheManWithABigPencil

TheManWithABigPencil — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:14:23 +0000

How exactly does moving temp files from a ssd drive to a slower hdd improve system performance???

By: SSD or not SSD, that’s the question | SolSie.com

SSD or not SSD, that’s the question | SolSie.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:15:28 +0000

[...] focusing on the Write cache, PIO and reallocate files that require intensive write operation, etc.. gHack has an excellent tutorial on [...]

By: Transcontinental

Transcontinental — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 13:11:56 +0000

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?

By: Dante

Dante — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:06:59 +0000

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.

By: LethAL

LethAL — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:42:49 +0000

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.

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:07:47 +0000

You might have misunderstood the intention of the article. It’s not about the endurance of longevity of the SSDs but about system performance.

By: Js Op de Beeck

Js Op de Beeck — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:59:36 +0000

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.