Solid State Drive Optimization Guide

[tcsenter]

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.

But its important to read..."few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs". Ergo, SSDs that do not properly declare themselves don't get 'detected' as an SSD. MS implemented a random read performance test to infer SSD but it does not disable everything that will be when the SSD explicitly declares itself properly.

 

[taltamir]

worthless guide, worthless program.
Here is the tweaks you need to do for an SSD for windows 7:
1. Enable AHCI in the bios

thats it. heck, a lot of the "tweaks" windows 7 itself does are unnecessary and detract from your overall experience, because they were designed for JMICRON ssds which had worse random write performance than spindle drives. However, a good modern SSD like the intel or indilinx based ones outperform spindle drives in random writes. This means that you DO want to have all your stuff enabled and set to the SSD. you DO want to the swap file on the SSD, you do want indexing and caching, etc...
the correct optimization should be "put your swap file on the fastest random write drive you have", not "disable it on SSDs, put it on spindle"

The only "correct" optimization needed is to properly align it, and to disable defragging, and the latter is because it defrags SSDs wrong (defrag tools don't have access to the actual allocation table of the SSD, instead it resolves each address to its own real internal address). Trim lets SSD controllers defrag their own free space without needing to know the filesystem (which they can do because they know the real address of each bit of data).

oh sure, those things increase the read/write speed of your SSD, but they also increase the speed on a spindle drive... and they increase that speed at a variety of other costs. For example, no indexing means that finding files takes forever instead of nearly instant.

 

[EarthwormJim]

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.

From my experience with indexing in Vista, I do not want to use it.

Since new files are not instantly indexed, anytime I search for something, I often cannot find these new files. I have to click the option to include non-indexed locations (the search ends up being just as long as if indexing was disabled). Unless that has changed in Windows 7 I do not want to bother with indexing.

 

[Nothinman]

From my experience with indexing in Vista, I do not want to use it.

Since new files are not instantly indexed, anytime I search for something, I often cannot find these new files. I have to click the option to include non-indexed locations (the search ends up being just as long as if indexing was disabled). Unless that has changed in Windows 7 I do not want to bother with indexing.

I'd guess that you're in the minority then. I can't say that it's instance, but it's good enough that I haven't had any problems with it. If I just saved a file somewhere, chances are I know where I put it so I don't need to search for it.

 

[jimhsu]

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.

If the drive is powered off, the data should last for 10 years, at a minimum. This is only relevant if there is no activity to the drive at all, and no power.

 

[jimhsu]

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.

Superfetch and defrag services will be ON, but as long as they are not operating ON the SSD drive, then everything is fine. If "Disk Defragmenter" shows up as "Never run" for the SSD, then that drive hasn't been defragged. In fact, Windows won't allow you to schedule defrag on a SSD. Simple as that.


Please read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

 

[Nothinman]

If the drive is powered off, the data should last for 10 years, at a minimum. This is only relevant if there is no activity to the drive at all, and no power.

So? I doubt anyone's using SSDs for offsite storage just yet.

 

[gmjimmy]

gmjimmy, what is "Ultimate SSD Speed Tweaks"?

Is this it?
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/win...-ultimate-solid-state-drive-speed-tweaks.html

Yes it is!

 

[Majic 7]

Please read this

I have read that and it doesn't change the fact that Windows reported the features as enabled and that I had to manually disable them. Did I say it was true for everyone? Reading comprehension on these forums is frightening at times.

 

[jimhsu]

So? I doubt anyone's using SSDs for offsite storage just yet.

As I said, this is typically not relevant. It will be, however, if some organization decides to use flash media for archival storage (think Time Capsule/Rosetta Stone/End of the World project) because of mistaken fixation about its extreme durability. That would be ... a bad idea.

 

[jimhsu]

I have read that and it doesn't change the fact that Windows reported the features as enabled and that I had to manually disable them. Did I say it was true for everyone? Reading comprehension on these forums is frightening at times.

Are files being retrieved from the SSD by superfetch (check w/ the resource monitor) or has defrag actually run on the SSD? The services WILL be enabled regardless whether or not you HAVE a SSD in the system (that is by design). If so, file a bug report with Microsoft, because that shouldn't happen.

"not on the disk select page" - then the detection is correct. Defrag will still run for your mechanical hard drives, unless you disable the service.

 

[tcsenter]

I have read that and it doesn't change the fact that Windows reported the features as enabled and that I had to manually disable them. Did I say it was true for everyone? Reading comprehension on these forums is frightening at times.

You stated not to believe everything that was claimed on the MSDN blog about features being disabled for SSD drives, due to the fact that none of those features that Microsoft claimed should be disabled were disabled after installing your SSD, when the very same page you asserted should not be believed clarified what would be disabled, when, and why (unlike you, who just made blanket assertions).

IOW, everything from Microsoft about SSD drives can be believed. Your information, however, not so much...

 

[jimhsu]

You stated not to believe everything that was claimed on the MSDN blog about features being disabled for SSD drives, due to the fact that none of those features that Microsoft claimed should be disabled were disabled after installing your SSD, when the very same page you asserted should not be believed clarified what would be disabled, when, and why (unlike you, who just made blanket assertions).

IOW, everything from Microsoft about SSD drives can be believed. Your information, however, not so much...

I see you are also confused by his post. Perhaps a screenshot is in order.

 

[Beautiful_Life]

Here's my take on the various SSD tweaks.

1. Turn off hibernation - useful. I can boot into windows in 20 second. That is until I get control of my mouse and can open a folder or start a program in a flash. So hibernation doesn;t make much sense to me. I've sleep if I need to conserve power.

2. Turn of prefecth - usefull. Prefect monitors frequently accessed files and places them a folder. This waste my processing power and wears out my SSD. The worst part it, it waste time loading all those files into the RAM at startup. On a HDD, startup time is shortened because the startup files are nicely organized in a folder. However on an SSD, it's useless because seek times are so fast. So I'm just wasting time loading all those files into memory. Programs load almost instantly, so I don't need to have their files sitting in the RAM.

3. Disabled superfetch and boot tracing - very usefull. This is a SSD killer and proc waster since it's a kind of mini defrag. It constantly analyzes user activity and re-arranges boot files and program files so that there are close to each other and in sequence, thus reducing the seek time lag, but on SSDs, that doesn't matter much. On HDDs yeah, it really helps on my HDD PC.

4. Enable largeSystemCache in registry - bs. This setting actually gives disk read and write priority to background services instead of programs. For a home user, your background services aren't as important as your programs.

5. Enable write caching and disable cache flushing - usefull. Intel SSDs do have a cache and this setting writes up until the cache is full, then only passes it to the SSDs. Less actual writes since writes are done in clusters, not really bit by bit. In terms of speed, it doesn't make a difference.

6.Disabling startup items - LOL utter nonsense. I've tested my boot time with a full load of startup items and with all disabled. I get full control in the same time. This is because SSD has super low seek time and super fast random read, plus Intel's SSD controller is really good. So all the small startup programs being loaded won't bog you down if you want to say launch Word or Firefox instantly. The SSD can handle the extra random reads without any lag.

6. Change IRRT to AHCI mode - very very useful. IRRT wastes processing power and causes very irritating lags if you're not using a RAID setup. On Benchmarks, my SSD read and writes increase by about 15%. In real world terms, launching programs, opening songs and boot up is about 40% faster.

7. Change IDE to AHCI. - don't know. Supposedly, SSDs run faster in IDE. Something to do with the NCQ. Some people say it doesn't. Some people say it makes the SSD slower. From what's I've read I think IDE is the best mode, but I've never tried it out since I can't you my eSATA port in IDE.

8. Installing your chipset drivers or INF update. I've never read about this in any SSD tweak guide and just discovered it recently. It's the best tweak ever, esp if you did a clean Window's install. My random reads almost doubled.

9. Disabled defrag - useful. As mentioned above, fragmentation hardly matters. Defrag will just kill you SSD. If you have another HDD installed, just turn off the automatic defrag but leave the service on. You can manually defrag your HDD anytime you like.

10. Disabled search indexing - useful. I find searches blazingly fast without it. I don't need to waste proc power doing this.

11. Disabling pagefile - bs. Alot of programs crash when I disabled it. By monitoring the total amount of writes to my SSD using tools like Intel SSD toolbox or Crystal Disk Info, I've found out that it hardly does much writes. So it doesn't seem like a treat to my SSD, plus it's seems like an integral part of Windows, so I left it on. It's not a process, so I don't lose any proc time on it.