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SSD questions

C

Craig234

Lifer
I've had an 80GB Intel SSD for years (4?) (ya, I should upgrade it to a 256GB I bought).

Questions:

Is there any maintenance I should have to do, like de-fragging or anything else?

Is de-fragging a good idea or bad idea?

Is the SSD a likely culprit for system slowdown I see - when I boot the system is fast, but after hours/days it gets slower and slower. There are 4GB of RAM (I should install more I have sitting around), I tend to have 1-2 dozen IE tabs open and get Windows popups saying 'IE is using 300 MB recommend closing it') and World of tanks and a few small things running - doesn't seem like that much.

It gets to where basic things - like reloading a page on AT - can take nearly a minute of disk activity. Just now making a new folder in Windows explorer took over 15 seconds.

Disk space is low, but not big problem low; 6GB free on SSD (boot drive for Windows 7) and 12GB free on 1TB hard drive (I should install the 3TB I got to add).

Any test I can/should run on the drives to see if they're slow as a hardware problem? Seems unlikely given they are ok after a reboot.

So two things, one about SSD maintenance/defragging, the other system slowdown.
 
7.5% free space isn't helping any. Even the recommended minimum of 10% freespace on an SSD is pushing it if you expect to maintain any kind of performance.

Windows 7 natively takes care of garbage collection, and defragging isn't recommended. I'd suggest either clearing out some junk or think about getting a 256GB SSD. I run the 256GB Samsung 840 Pro and they're superb. the Egg's got the 256/840 for 190 bucks and 256/840 Pro for 240 bucks.

EDIT: sorry!..skipped right over you already bought a 256GB. Clone the 80Gb to the 256GB and done. Setup the 80GB with Intel's SRT to accelerate your 1TB drive.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the replies. I forgot one question, should pagefile.sys be on the C: SSD that has Windows 7 and is the boot drive, or on E: hard drive?

FYI the pagefile.sys is about 7.5B.

I'm not sure what you mean about 'set up the 80GB with Intel's SRT to accellerate the 1TB drive'. Wouldn't the 256GB replace the 80GB?

Does the 7.5% free issue explain why it's fast after a reboot and slows?
 
I keep my pagefile on my SSDs because it defeats the purpose (speed of the SSD vs HDD) to put in on a HDD.

About SRT: Unless you have at least a Z68 chipset, LGA 1155 cpu socket, and don't mind reinstalling Windows in SATA/RAID mode since, per Intel's "requirement", SRT isn't available in SATA/AHCI mode; forget what I mentioned about setting up SRT.

On the other hand, you've probably read about the problem of users installing Windows 7 in IDE mode on a HDD, then cloning it to an SSD that needs to be in AHCI mode for best performance, but after you change the BIOS to AHCI mode and try to boot the SSD with the cloned IDE Windows 7 image, it won't boot.

The simple solution is, before you clone the IDE Windows 7 installation to the SSD, you perform a simple little registry edit then restart the computer, immediately go into the BIOS setup, change from IDE to AHCI mode, save and exit. When you boot back into Windows it'll now be in AHCI mode, ready to be cloned, and fully bootable, on your new SATA/AHCI SSD.

And with just a minor difference in the registry keys that get edited, you can use this exact (non-Intel) procedure to switch a SATA/AHCI Windows 7 installation over to SATA/RAID, making it possible to now Enable Intel SRT w/RAID on an AHCI Windows Installation.

The above procedure would let you install Intel SRT on your newly cloned SATA/RAID 256GB SSD, and use it to setup your old (fresly wiped) 80GB SSD as a high-performance file cache for your HDDs.

As to your last question: yes!

.
 
Remember that the time it needs to do garbage collection is a function of how much free space you have. If you get a lot of swap file activity, and if your free blocks are scattered on pages throughout your SSD, then yes you could easily run into a point where it is forced to do garbage collection while waiting for a disk I/O operation. I suggest you clean your SSD. For example,delete the contents of your C:\windows\software distribution\download folder. (Not the folder itself). There are several places where you can free up space.
 
yeah like the others have said, get some more free space if still running the 80gb ssd. otherwise follow the superb instructions provided by Bubbaleone to clone and set up intel srt. if you have itunes, changing the directory path for the apps and music to the 1 tb drive frees up a lot of space. I do that with mine and it saves my ssd around 20-25 gb of space.
 
OK. I'm not familiar with what SRT is.

If you know other good ways to free space, great. All I keep on C: is Windows 7, World of Warcraft, and a few small utilities. (And pagefile and the hibernate file).

I can use a utility to see what's taking up space, but it's a bit tedious as nothing very large jumps out.

The software distribution download folder has only about 200kb.
 
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