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Solid State Drive Optimization Guide

Awesome guide.

Since getting my new SSD, I've been wondering about some of these things. Disabling superfetch and prefetch doesn't seem like a big deal since I have plenty of ram.

I also installed the Intel SATA drivers for my laptop. I think it came with the chipset driver. So I guess I shouldn't have done that?
 
I don't know if I agree with disabling prefetch, especially when the user has plenty of RAM.

Also about turning off indexing, I wonder if on a drive that supports TRIM with 30% free space it would make a difference. I have only 30% of my drive filled and 70% free even with indexing on. I bet it does help search speeds to leave it on if space is not an issue.

I would love to see some empirical evidence on those 2 tweaks.
 
sxr7171 said:
I don't know if I agree with disabling prefetch, especially when the user has plenty of RAM.

Also about turning off indexing, I wonder if on a drive that supports TRIM with 30% free space it would make a difference. I have only 30% of my drive filled and 70% free even with indexing on. I bet it does help search speeds to leave it on if space is not an issue.

I would love to see some empirical evidence on those 2 tweaks.
Click to expand...

It takes around 8 seconds to search my entire C: drive which is a 120gb Vertex with 90gb of data on it and indexing disabled. I don't see how you could get a whole lot faster with indexing enabled.
 
I found this guide a few days ago. I just installed a new Canon MP620B about two weeks ago. After I did my ram usage went from around 860/1000 to about 1500 GB. I know 7 can handle it but I tried disabling everything but didn't turn off write-caching buffer flushing, and my ram usage went back to below 1000. Don't know if that makes any difference at all but it is sort of interesting. So far I haven't noticed any detrimental effects.

edit. Went from a very consistent 427 to 434 on AS SSD benchmark. My SSD is about 30% full.
 
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Some comments (particularly page 7):

-Leave the defrag SERVICE on, because it will defrag your mechanical hard disks and leave the SSD alone. This doesn't apply of course if you have your own defrag utility.
-System restore saved me more times than I can count. Keep it to a minimum, but unless you image your drives every week, I recommend leaving it on.
-Indexing is subjective. For my search strategy, I leave indexing on for only documents (content searching) and use Everything for ... everything else for blazing fast 200 millisecond search times.
-Superfetch is also turned off by default for SSDs and on for mechanical hard drives.
-Prefetch is unlikely to matter either way.

Other tips:

-Make the page file the minimum size (i.e. 200MB) but LEAVE IT ON if you have a SSD. This is more for compatibility reasons (i.e. Photoshop) and getting minidumps (i.e. blue screens) than anything.
-Turn off hibernation, reduce the recycle bin size, set system restore size to a minimum. All of these save space.
 
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Another comment on page 7.
As regards write caching (Enable write-caching on this device)
Intel drives don't write cache (except for preparing the data for storage to flash) - so this doesn't do anything on these drives.
Some SSDs do have write caches - but unless it's got a sandforce controller and an ultracapacitor - it can't guarantee saving the data in case of power failure. With some drives having 64 MB of cache - a power failure could easily total a partition, even a high-reliability file system like NTFS might be trashed beyond repair. Now, mechanical HDs benefit massively from write caching, but SSDs less so. The risk of file trashing may not be worth it on an SSD, as the performance boost is so much less than HD.

The 2nd point is on the same window:
"Turn off windows write cache-buffer flushing". This peculiarly named option is a Windows 3.11 compatability fix! (No, really! It activates a bug in Windows 3.11 that was fixed in Win 95).
Buffer flushing allows an app to check that data it is saving to a file has actually gone to disk. This allows apps to modify files in such a way that the file can survive a system crash or power failure during saving without getting hosed, or containing inconsistent data.
Some buggy business apps in the W3.11 days went a bit crazy with buffer flushing (incompetent programmers didn't understand what buffer flushing was about). This didn't matter because in W3.11 buffer flushing didn't actually work. In W95 buffer flushing was fixed, and these apps ran like ass - and this caused uproar. The publishers of the other apps couldn't believe it was their own bugs causing poor performance, and lawyered up so hard that MS execs got hauled in front of Congress to explain themselves.
MS enabled the buffer flushing bug in OSR2 (calling it 'advanced performance'), and it's stayed there ever since.
In short: this option allows extremely old, buggy apps to run without slowdown, but means correctly written apps that try to protect your data are unable to do so.

Cliffs:
"Enable write caching" - Good idea. But if reliability is critical, turning it off isn't a disaster (unlike mechanical HD).
"Disable write buffer flushing" - Pointless. Allows buggy, extremely obsolete business software to run without slowdown. Subverts well written apps attempts to protect your data.
 
Do not trust what Microsoft says Windows 7 will do if a SSD is detected. I have seen lots of posts about this and it is not a given. Windows did not disable any of the features Microsoft said it would on my system and I have seen references to posts on the OCZ forums that it doesn't on OCZs either. It does seem to disable defrag on the SSD, it's not on the disk select page, but I haven't had any reason to defrag so I keep it disabled.
Whether any of the tweaks really make a difference that is noticeable, probably not. I got a small increase in a benchmark, and my ram usage went down, but the ram usage wasn't causing a problem anyway.
 
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Majic 7 said:
Do not trust what Microsoft says Windows 7 will do if a SSD is detected. I have seen lots of posts about this and it is not a given. Windows did not disable any of the features Microsoft said it would on my system and I have seen references to posts on the OCZ forums that it doesn't on OCZs either. It does seem to disable defrag on the SSD, it's not on the disk select page, but I haven't had any reason to defrag so I keep it disabled.
Whether any of the tweaks really make a difference that is noticeable, probably not. I got a small increase in a benchmark, and my ram usage went down, but the ram usage wasn't causing a problem anyway.
Click to expand...

It did for me, did you run the test to determine your Windows Experience Index? I thought the hard drive settings were based on the hard drive score.
 
EJ, I ran the WEI and got 7.8 on the HD part from the start.. I started fresh with W7 on the SSD and had superfetch and prefetch running since I installed. There is someone named ambitzytl who has been posting on Intel's SSD forum and MS TechNet about this ever since the drives came out. I've seen posts on his threads that confirm we aren't the only two that have run into this. And thanks Mark for the clarification on cache-buffer flushing.
 
EarthwormJim said:
It takes around 8 seconds to search my entire C: drive which is a 120gb Vertex with 90gb of data on it and indexing disabled. I don't see how you could get a whole lot faster with indexing enabled.
Click to expand...

Enabling the indexing service gets you a lot more than that, like the ability to search inside of binary files like PDFs and Office docs and it'll index Outlook as well.

Reads don't wear on the drive like writes though, right? So if it's possible it might be good to move the index itself to a non-SSD drive but the indexing of the SSD shouldn't hurt much.
 
I don't think 'wear' is a factor with SSD on writes, or reads, correct me if I am wrong...some factual proof would be nice to see how it degrades if it does too.
 
ViviTheMage said:
If you disable defrag as a process...you can't get to the defragmentation schedule, correct? Because I try to click on Start Menu -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter and nothing loads, I assume because I killed the service all together.

Is that correct?
Click to expand...

Must be because the same happened to me. Can't get to defrag. I thought about re-enabling the service just to check but keep forgetting to do it, lol.

Edit: Just re-enabled the service and I could indeed set the schedule for defrag. I have opted to disable the service and use Auslogics defragger on a schedule for my non-SSD drives.
 
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ViviTheMage said:
I don't think 'wear' is a factor with SSD on writes, or reads, correct me if I am wrong...some factual proof would be nice to see how it degrades if it does too.
Click to expand...

Each MLC has a theoretical maximum of about 10,000 writes so wear is indeed a factor on SSD's when it comes to writes. Wear leveling is supposed to spread the writes around, even if it has to move entire blocks that have been "fixed" for some time. How well it works is anyone's guess.
 
Engineer said:
Each MLC has a theoretical maximum of about 10,000 writes so wear is indeed a factor on SSD's when it comes to writes. Wear leveling is supposed to spread the writes around, even if it has to move entire blocks that have been "fixed" for some time. How well it works is anyone's guess.
Click to expand...

Gotcha, wasn't sure how it effected SSD's. So, technically...if I loaded up an OS, and never reformatted, the drive could last for centuries!

Engineer said:
Must be because the same happened to me. Can't get to defrag. I thought about re-enabling the service just to check but keep forgetting to do it, lol.
Click to expand...

Yeah..I am going to check when I get home, haha. I have a SATA drive that I load all my downloads to, so it doesn't write data that I download onto my SSD that I will later put on my server storage/raid.
 
Gotcha, wasn't sure how it effected SSD's. So, technically...if I loaded up an OS, and never reformatted, the drive could last for centuries!
Click to expand...

Maybe if it wasn't Windows or you use a custom PE build to redirect all writes to a RAM drive since Windows writes to the drive constantly and you can't mount the filesystem read-only like you can in unix.
 
ViviTheMage said:
Gotcha, wasn't sure how it effected SSD's. So, technically...if I loaded up an OS, and never reformatted, the drive could last for centuries!
Click to expand...

Don't think so. I think the cells also degrade over time as well. But, unless you keep ALL writes off the drive, then wear leveling would move stuff around trying to "equalize" the writes to all the cells. The lower number of writes, the longer the drive will last. I figure that the 3 year warranty will get me to the next best thing SSD anyway! 😛
 
Majic 7 said:
Do not trust what Microsoft says Windows 7 will do if a SSD is detected. I have seen lots of posts about this and it is not a given. Windows did not disable any of the features Microsoft said it would on my system and I have seen references to posts on the OCZ forums that it doesn't on OCZs either. It does seem to disable defrag on the SSD, it's not on the disk select page, but I haven't had any reason to defrag so I keep it disabled.
Whether any of the tweaks really make a difference that is noticeable, probably not. I got a small increase in a benchmark, and my ram usage went down, but the ram usage wasn't causing a problem anyway.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this aswell, I had to manually shut off alot of this stuff as windows didn't do it. The only one I didn't have to mess with was the defrag.
 
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