Got A Slow SSD? Try FlashFire To Speed Things Up
If you are like me you like to test new software and hardware. This can sometimes be a curse as it can lead to buying hardware that has not is new and not optimized yet so that the computer system suffers thanks to the user's "I want to have it now" syndrome.
This happened when I wanted to build a computer system with a Solid State Drive (SSD) as the boot drive. Those generation 1 drives did not live up to the promises the manufacturers made. Especially the performance decrease over time was noticeable and frustrating. This is currently changing with new technologies and second generation Solid State Drives but if you are stuck with a generation 1 drive you need to figure something out.
FlashFire is a software program for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 that can speed up computer systems with SSDs noticeably. The description on the developer's website is a bit vague. FlashFire seems to make use of computer memory to speed up random writes of a connected SSD. Probably something comparable to a RAM disk.
The good news is that the software works. It works that well that the performance gain is very noticeable after installation of the software and a reboot of the system. There is another aspect that is kinda confusing. Some users state that they have a icon in the system tray upon startup. Some users on the other hand say they do not. This apparently depends on the version of the software program. There are two things that users need to know: Flashfire needs to be started with parameters and settings can only be changed in the Windows Registry.
To start Flashfire a user would use the command flashfire.exe on to turn it on or flashfire x where x is the drive number that the program should speed up. Users who use flashfire.exe on have to make sure that a SSD is the configured drive in the Registry. They need to navigate to
HK_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ffire\Enum
and check the drive number of the Solid State Drive there. They then need to navigate to
HK_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ffire\Parameters
and make sure that drive number is the value of the Disknum key. Flashfire can be turned off easily by issuing the command flashfire.exe off. Several users reported great success with Flashfire on Asus EEEPCs with Solid State Drives. Flashfire can be downloaded from the developer's website.
Update: The developer website is no longer available. We have uploaded the latest working version of FlashFire to our own server. Note that we don't support it it any way. Click on the following link to start the download: (Download Removed)
Excellent effect.
Originally I wanted to throw away my aged Acer Aspire One because it was already very slow when surfing the net. However, after installing Flashfire, surfing has become much faster and I am still using my netbook. Thanks
you are an angel! thanks!this worked for me!
Flashfire.org is no more. The site is gone. I found a copy of “flashfire.exe” but it does not seem to be the utility this article is about. it seems to be some sort of mini browser? or browser plug in.
Does anyone have a link to the ssd utility flashfire? The wiki is still up. But none of the links work.
I have uploaded the latest working version to the site.
Doesn’t support 64-bit at all… Would definitely be worth the time if it did though.
Hello Justin….were you able to make it work for 64BIT OS…Thank you
Damn, didn’t believe it would speed up this much!
Flashfire works great. I use it on an XP netbook with MTRON SSD and on Windows7 with Kingston V+ SSD. In both instances the small writes were GREATLY improved whilst taking a very small hit on reads. What this meant for me was faster boots and programs opening much faster. Photoshop 7 is fully usable in 3.5 seconds or less and MS Office programs in 1 sec or less. Both of my hard drives are pretty fast anyway, Flashfire has made them faster. I used ATTO disk benchmark and Crystal diskmark to measure results. Definately recommend this software and make sure to check registry settings as outlined because it does matter.
If what this application does is act as a buffer for random writes, turning them into sequential ones before writing them to disk, then it should, at least in theory, work on normal hard drives as well, because newer hard drives have sequential write speeds not that far off from the best ssds. Also, relative to ssds, there is a much bigger difference between random write speeds and sequential write speeds when using a hard drive which could mean more of an improvement is seen when using this on hard drives instead of ssds.
It does have a flaw though, which is there is a delay between the request to write the data and the data being written to non volatile memory, which could result in data loss in the event of a power cut, although it is possible this is countered by decreasing the time taken by the actual write.