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SSD and TRIM, AHCI, Page File, etc

EduCat

EduCat

Senior member
Hi everyone,

I added a Samsung 850 pro SSD to my main rig a little while back. It is my first experience with an SSD and so far it's been a very pleasant one. (Saw the thread about the new firmware, glad that I did!)

While researching different drives for a computer I am working on, I came across reviews which talked about TRIM, AHCI, page file, and disabling Superfetch and Prefetch. When I originally installed my drive, I used the samsung software to just clone my existing HD and off I went.

I also read that TRIM is enabled automatically if you install an os to a new HD, but didnt say if it had to be a fresh install.

So my question is, should I do all of this with my SSD? I'd rather not degrade it's performance any fast than it needs to be. Would TRIM already be enabled?

Thanks!
 
If you're running Win 7 or later there's nothing special you need to do except maybe keep a txt file on the disk with a special thank you note for the brave forum members who sacrificed their 850 Pro SSD's so that others may have a safe firmware upgrade. ()🙂
 
You did the right thing. Just use it.

Next best thing you can do is to no longer trust information from the sources that mentioned junk about page file, and disabling Superfetch and Prefetch. There is lots of old information out there, and even more people who sped read it and spout and spread even more old, bad info.

I used to suggest double checking alignment and that defrag is not on, but it's become a non-issue over the years ever since disk utilities have been updated. But it's never a bad idea to double check.
 
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TRIM is done by the FS, in this case NTFS. It's automatic, if you use MSIDE, MSAHCI, or Iastor (Intel's drivers). Check it:
http://lifehacker.com/5640971/check-if-trim-is-enabled-for-your-solid-state-drive-in-windows-7

With most drives these days, it won't make or break performance, but it only improves performance if on, so you may as well.

Check alignment. The easiest way I know is to get AS-SSD. If the partition offset is green, and says OK, you're good to go. Most custom installs (IE, not done by Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc.) will be aligned properly even on HDDs. 1MB is recommended as a general default, but most drives will handle less just fine (Crucial's M500, one of a few SSDs that documents such recommended settings, recommends 128KB, FI, which 1MB is aligned to). If it's aligned to a 4K or larger power of 2, though, I wouldn't reinstall, or use any utilities to try to fix it by re-cloning (FI, let's say it's aligned to 60KB, or 245760B, well, that's aligned to 4K, so good enough).

Get a big enough SSD to hold the page file and hibernate file, then don't worry about them. That crap is from the days of 64GB SSDs being the only affordable ones. If you don't use either, remove them and free up the space, but don't treat them any differently based on having an SSD.

Superfetch is Prefetch. It can be a waster of IO with HDDs, but is merely superfluous with SSDs. It keeps track of your used files, and loads them into the RAM cache preemptively. For an office user, with a lot of common files day in and day out, it works very well. But if your usage isn't so normal, it can screw up big time, doing things like loading giant game files, and software updates, into RAM, slowing the PC down instead of speeding it up.

If your SSD performs well enough in one of the tests done as part of the experience index testing, it should automatically be disabled. Many SSDs, while perfectly fast in practice, don't do well enough in that test, I guess, so you'll just have to check it, if you want (many SSDs today have higher read access times than older ones, which might be what throws it off).

That said about Superfetch, you can safely leave it alone. If it screws up, you'll notice with an HDD; while it does no more than waste a few Watt-seconds per day on an SSD, if even that. Also, with Windows 8 and up, you may want to leave it on, since it is used to help shutdown and start up quicker, by prefetching into the hibernate file(s).

...For a fresh install, just make sure no drives but the SSD and OS media are hooked up, and let Windows' installer do the rest.
 
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Cerb said:
If your SSD performs well enough in one of the tests done as part of the experience index testing, it should automatically be disabled. Many SSDs, while perfectly fast in practice, don't do well enough in that test, I guess, so you'll just have to check it, if you want (many SSDs today have higher read access times than older ones, which might be what throws it off).
Click to expand...

I reckon I received a 7.9/7.9 on the index test. I'll check the alignment later tonight when I get out of work.
 
Just got home and ran AS-SSD. Not sure if the score is good or not, but general read/write speeds seem pretty good, no?

ssd.png
 
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