One of my personal criteria therefor is that defragmentation software needs to be able to block those drives from being included in defragmentation runs.

The popular defragmentation software Defraggler has recently been updated by its parent company Piriform. The software, while not blocking Solid State Drives outright, is now warning users if they select a SSD for defragmentation.

When you first start the defragmentation software you see a list of all connected drives and various stats collected by the software. Stats include each drive’s overall capacity, used and free space, fragmentation and a status field which indicates if the drive is ready for defragmentation and whether it is a SSD or not.

You can still select a SSD for defragmentation but the program will display the warning message on the screenshot above if you do so.

But that’s not the only new feature of the latest Defraggler version. The developers have added disk and file benchmarking capabilities. For the benchmarking options to become available, you first need to analyze a disk or partition. This analysis displays the fragmentation of the partition or drive, plus it displays a button to benchmark that drive. A click on the button runs a disk performance check on the drive that calculates the drive’s random read speed.

It is furthermore possible to benchmark individual files by switching to the file list tab, right-clicking one of the files and selecting to benchmark it from the context menu.

The changelog lists the following additions, fixes and changes to Defraggler 2.08:

• Added Disk and File benchmarking.
• Added Volume Shadow Service (VSS) compatible mode.
• Improvements to disk health tab.
• Added Real Value information to SMART data.
• Health tab now supports Fahrenheit.
• Improvements to SSD detection.
• Minor fixes to scheduler stop commands.
• Minor defrag algorithm improvements.
• Translation fixes.

Better SSD detection is a great addition to Defraggler. Windows users can download the latest version of Defraggler from the developer website. (via)

We have also covered tips to optimize Windows for Solid State Drives in the past which suggested among other things to move caches from the SSD to another drive.

That tip was problematic, especially for users with only SSDs connected to their computer.

A workaround for those users is to use a ram disk for caching purposes. Ram disks, sometimes also called ram drives, are storage devices that use computer memory to store the data.

This is obviously only a feasible alternative if the PC has enough system memory that can be spared for the ram disk. Any PC with three or more Gigabytes of computer memory should be able to run a ram disk for caching purposes.

This article covers the creation of the ram disk and explains how to move the cache from the SSD to the ram disk.

Windows users can select from a variety of Ramdisk applications. We have covered Ramdisk.sys in the past for instance but will use the Dataram Ramdisk software this time.

The free version of the program supports ramdisk up to a size of 4 Gigabytes. This is sufficient for moving the cache to the ram disk and for most other uses as well.

Start the Dataram RAMDisk Configuration Utility after installation. The tool is listed in the Dataram Ramdisk start menu entry.

ramdisk

The ram disk is configured in the Settings tab. The size, file system and boot sector settings can be defined in here. How much memory should you turn into a ram disk? That depends on the memory installed and the required size of the caching directories.. Users with four or more Gigabytes can use at least a One gigabyte disk.

One option to find out how much of the memory can be used is to open the Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc, switch to the performance tab and look at the physical memory section. Using half of the ram under the available section is usually a safe bet.

The file system can either be Fat16 or Fat32. Users who prefer NTFS or another file system need to select unformatted and format the disk in Windows after it has been created.

A click on Start RAMDisk will create the disk and assign a free drive letter to it.

ram disk

The f: drive in the screenshot above is the newly created ram disk.

The second step of the process is to configure the applications and operating system to make use of the ram disk by changing the cache directories to a location on the new ramdrive.

We give examples for the Windows temporary file folders, Firefox and Internet Explorer caches.

Windows Temporary Folders

The Windows temp directories are stored in the system’s environment variables. The easiest way to open the configuration window is by pressing Windows-Pause on the keyboard and selecting Advanced System Settings from the sidebar of the window that opens.

Locate the Advanced tab in System Properties and click on Environmental Variables. Here we have user variables and system variables.

environment variables

Candidates here are for instance the TEMP and TMP system and user variables. They can be edited by selecting each one of them and clicking on Edit. Simply enter the new path in the variable value field and leave the variable name as it is.

changing windows temp folder

Changing Firefox Cache

Open the Firefox web browser and type in about:config in the Firefox address bar. Enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory in the filter field and double-click the parameter.

Now enter a location on the ram disk to make Firefox use that as the caching folder.

firefox cache location

Internet Explorer Cache

Open Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and click on Tools > Internet Options. The Internet Options are also accessible from the Windows Control Panel.

Click on Settings next to browsing history in the General tab and on Move Folder in the next window to move the temporary Internet Files folder to the ram disk.

temporary internet files

There is another benefit of using a ram disk for caching locations. The ram disk will automatically be cleared on shutdown which makes recovery of those caching files afterwards impossible (unless a snapsnot of the ram is taken shortly after shutdown).

Solid State Drives benefit from the reduced write operations and it might even speed up some operations marginally.

Their biggest downfall besides the price is the write speed which can be low. So low that it will slow down the computer system when data is written on that drive. Many programs, including web browsers, email programs, editors but also the operating system itself cache data on the hard drive or use the hard drive to store temporary data. That’s a problem if the cache folder of that application is located on the Solid State.

What can be done to speed up the overall computer system?

• Move the temp folders of the operating system to another hard drive.
• Move the pagefile and System Restore locations to another hard drive
• Move the cache of applications to another hard drive, e.g. web browsers, email clients.
• Disable programs that access the hard drive and that are not needed, like Windows Indexing Service
• Upgrade the computer memory of the computer system (only makes sense if sub 4 Gigabybtes on a 32-bit system)

Most of these tips center around moving the cache to a new hard drive and disabling features that slow down the computer system. If you cannot install a second hard drive to the computer system you might consider adding a fast external device that can be used for caching. The downside of this method is that you need to have it near the computer system all the time which can be annoying if the system is mostly used on the road.

Newer Solid State Drives (check the OCZ Vertex review for instance) are slowly introduced that beat conventional hard drives fair and square both in write and read performance. They come at a price though but this is going to change in the future. Prices will drop, capacities increase and the slower SSD will slowly cease to exist.

This in effect means that all methods of overwriting free space are not sufficient for erasing the data securely on those drives. This also means as well that it is not possible to erase specific files securely on the SSD. Users who want to delete data securely on SSDs have therefor the following options at hand:

• Encryption
• Format
• Filling the Drive

Encryption is surely the best method of ensuring that the data on a SSD is secure as it cannot be accessed without decryption. Formatting the drive on the other hand is only reasonable if no data on that drive is needed anymore. It would otherwise require extensive backup and restoration procedures. Filling the drive with data might work as well as it would overwrite anything on the drive as well.

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?

With more and more Solid State Drives hitting the streets it is important to understand the differences. Defragmentation describes the process of physically organizing the contents of a hard drive or partition so that the data sectors of each file will be stored close together to reduce load and seek times.

Solid State Drives can access any location on the drive in the same time. This is one of the main advantages over hard drives. This also means that there is no need to defragment a Solid State Drive ever. These drives have actually been designed to write data evenly in all sectors of the drive which the industry is calling wear leveling. Each sector of a Solid State Drive has a limited number of writes before it cannot be overwritten anymore. (this is a theoretical limit which cannot be reached in work environments)

If you did defragment your Solid State Disk you can rest assured that you did not harm it in any way. It is just that this process is not needed and that defragmentation causes lots of write processes which means that the drive will reach its write limits sooner.

No need for defragmentation is therefor another advantage of Solid State Drives.