Superfetch keep enabled or disable it?

[bart1975]

I do mostly gaming on my system I have 6 gigs of ram and the swap file disabled. I am not sure what to do with superfetch though. I have only SSD drives in my system do I really need superfetch?

 

[ViRGE]

Yes, leave it on. There's absolutely no penalty in doing so; the only thing it can do is make your computer more responsive.

And while you're at it, I'd strongly suggest turning your swap file back on unless you're hurting that badly for drive space.

 

[Nothinman]

I do mostly gaming on my system I have 6 gigs of ram and the swap file disabled. I am not sure what to do with superfetch though. I have only SSD drives in my system do I really need superfetch?

You've apparently already gone through the idiot's guide to pointless tweaking so why not?

 

[postmortemIA]

Superfetch is disabled by Windows 7 for SSD drives as it is pointless for them. Even if you leave it on, it won't do anything for SSDs.
Superfetch is meant to reduce latency of mechanical drives; SSDs access random data at almost same rate as sequential data.

Same applies for disk defragmenter. Automated defragmenter won't touch SSDs.

 

[ViRGE]

Superfetch is disabled by Windows 7 for SSD drives as it is pointless for them. Even if you leave it on, it won't do anything for SSDs.
Superfetch is meant to reduce latency of mechanical drives; SSDs access random data at almost same rate as sequential data.

Same applies for disk defragmenter. Automated defragmenter won't touch SSDs.

Eh? Superfetch is enabled for SSDs. RAM is still orders of magnitude faster than SSDs/NAND.

 

[postmortemIA]

Eh? Superfetch is enabled for SSDs. RAM is still orders of magnitude faster than SSDs/NAND.

sorry dear mod, you are mistaken:

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.
Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.
Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

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

 

[lxskllr]

Seems to me it would still be beneficial to use Superfetch.

 

[ViRGE]

sorry dear mod, you are mistaken:


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

Humm, weird. It's still on for my Core i7 system with a Vertex 2.

Anyhow, thanks for the link Postmoterm.

 

[postmortemIA]

Humm, weird. It's still on for my Core i7 system with a Vertex 2.

Anyhow, thanks for the link Postmoterm.

it is on, but real measure of its use is amount of cached and free RAM. Superfetch itself ignores SSD drive if it meets criteria described in link.

On my windows 7 system with SSD, free RAM does not go down to ~0 like it does on other Win 7 system without SSD.

 

[DirkGently1]

The 'automatic' SSD optimizations in Win 7 don't always work. They never have for me with two different drives. If your SSD shows up in the Defraf utility it hasn't automatically optimized. Scheduled Defrag and Prefetch/Superfetch are the only things that need adjusting to account for an SSD.

 

[Nothinman]

The 'automatic' SSD optimizations in Win 7 don't always work. They never have for me with two different drives. If your SSD shows up in the Defraf utility it hasn't automatically optimized. Scheduled Defrag and Prefetch/Superfetch are the only things that need adjusting to account for an SSD.

I thought that was only for SSDs that don't identify themselves properly?

 

[Genx87]

I thought that was only for SSDs that don't identify themselves properly?

I believe this is the problem. Drives arent identifying themselves as an SSD. So Win7 wont optimize for the drive.

 

[Nothinman]

I believe this is the problem. Drives arent identifying themselves as an SSD. So Win7 wont optimize for the drive.

I hate hardware manufacturers...

 

[DirkGently1]

If you use an Intel SSD the 'Toolbox' app has a one-click optimise function. As far as i know it just does the things i mentioned before, but it's a quick and easy fix.

 

[Nothinman]

If you use an Intel SSD the 'Toolbox' app has a one-click optimise function. As far as i know it just does the things i mentioned before, but it's a quick and easy fix.

But that's just duct taping over the problem, the OS should be doing all of this for you. The fact that there are more steps to house clean your system is a step backwards.

 

[DirkGently1]

But that's just duct taping over the problem, the OS should be doing all of this for you. The fact that there are more steps to house clean your system is a step backwards.

Taping over what problem? Running an SSD with an OS primarily designed for use with HDD? Adding SSD support in Win 7 was a last minute thing as it was in that stage of development that SSD really took off. I'm sure Windows 8 will have no trouble optimizing itself when it detects an SSD.

If you had to do the 3 optimizations i mentioned manually, it takes less than a minute. No great hardship.

 

[Nothinman]

Taping over what problem? Running an SSD with an OS primarily designed for use with HDD? Adding SSD support in Win 7 was a last minute thing as it was in that stage of development that SSD really took off. I'm sure Windows 8 will have no trouble optimizing itself when it detects an SSD.

If you had to do the 3 optimizations i mentioned manually, it takes less than a minute. No great hardship.

Taping over the problem of some SSDs not identifying themselves properly. Win7 supports them just fine on its own if the device firmware was designed properly.

 

[DirkGently1]

I see what you mean. I'm surprised that neither my old Vertex over many firmware revisions (Rollseyes), or my Intel 320, indentify themselves. Which drives in the market now actually do that correctly?

I've seen at least one thread recently where somebody had noticed, after many months of using it, that their SSD was being defragged once a week on a schedule.