Got a SSD? Got Windows 7 or Vista? Want a full desktop all your stuff on it? Read on

[mcloughj]

Hi,

Had to pass on this nugget. If you own a SSD (i've recently bought two OCZ Agility Drives(now in raid 0!)) the you know that space is limited and wear and tear should be avoided. You've already moved your temp folders and pagefile to a common HDD, along with your IE cache and Firefox profile. There is one big thing you can do that will improve your windows fun: moving your desktop to the HDD!

It's really simple too.
1. Create a folder on your hdd drive (eg D:\mcloughj\) and open an explorer window in the folder
2. Click the start orb and then click your username (at the top of the right hand side of the start menu)
3. Hold down shift and left click the 'desktop' icon and drag it onto the folder created in 1. You it should say 'move to new folder'. Release the mouse button.
4. copy all the files you want on your desktop into the 'd:\mcloughj\desktop' folder
5. Enjoy the fruits of a full desktop without the annoying shortcuts and other guff.

Cheers!

 

[mcloughj]

this method also works for some of the other 'user' folders (app data for example) but i'm very tired (nearly 2am here) so if this gets a good response i'll write them up too (they involve registry changes and administrator accounts)

 

[lemonadesoda]

Not sure where all your "moving" is going to end up? I cant see why you are moving so much to the HDD... why not just put EVERYTHING on the HDD and send me the SSD for safekeeping

 

[techspec6]

lol, pretty funny.

In all seriousness though, it's a good tweak and not hard. Right clicking the windows logs and click properties will give you an option to offload those onto a HDD also. That's a lot of saved writes. It doesn't hurt the SSD snappyness either since the massive I/Os are still done within the OS volume. A bit of the best of both worlds. Good to see someone posting some SSD tweaks here.

Jason

 

[Wrigleyvillain]

Cool. Good idea. Now what about my whole user folder? Suppose I could Google That For Me

 

[LittleLizard]

dont understand but dont have ssd so its not of my interest

 

[robal]

Hi,
...moved your temp folders and pagefile to a common HDD, along with your IE cache and Firefox profile. There is one big thing you can do that will improve your windows fun: moving your desktop to the HDD!
...
Cheers!

Point #1:
I really don't believe you can kill (by tear/wear) your SSD before it becomes awfully obsolete because of age.

Point #2:
By relocating swap, cache, temps to HDD you're effectively letting go on advantages of having SSD.
SSDs are tremendously fast in small random reads (and writes).
The things you should put on SSD to have best performance increase in Windows are EXACTLY: swap, temps, caches.
If you can squeeze, put boot files, and program files there too.

Leave HDD only for large data which is read sequentially (ie, videos, large documents etc).

Cheers

 

[ERazer]

good infos ty

 

[lemonadesoda]

If you are worried about write-trashing your SSD due to internet temp folder, then how about setting up a ramdisk?

Throw those silly small RAM sticks away, and buy yourself some big-boy ram. Setup a ramdisk and point your temp directory there. The speed gains will be even better than on SSD, with the added bonus that when you turn off your PC, all the "temp" stuff will be lost.

C:/ (SSD) for Windows and Programs
D:/ (HDD) for data
R:/ (ramdisk) for volatile-temp

Links to read: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2139
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk
http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=131

And how-to video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hdyt54B_XI

Report back!

 

[mcloughj]

If you are worried about write-trashing your SSD due to internet temp folder, then how about setting up a ramdisk?

Throw those silly small RAM sticks away, and buy yourself some big-boy ram. Setup a ramdisk and point your temp directory there. The speed gains will be even better than on SSD, with the added bonus that when you turn off your PC, all the "temp" stuff will be lost.

C:/ (SSD) for Windows and Programs
D:/ (HDD) for data
R:/ (ramdisk) for volatile-temp

Links to read: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2139
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk
http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=131

And how-to video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hdyt54B_XI

Report back!

I actually have a gigabyte i-Ram with 4Gb of ram but I can't quiet fit it into my case (the psu is at the bottom and there's not quite enough clearance for the card. If i had a bit more time I would look into modding it to fit it into one of the dvd drive bays. But i never have enough time.

Your idea might be a runner!

 

[PP Mguire]

Point #1:
I really don't believe you can kill (by tear/wear) your SSD before it becomes awfully obsolete because of age.

Point #2:
By relocating swap, cache, temps to HDD you're effectively letting go on advantages of having SSD.
SSDs are tremendously fast in small random reads (and writes).
The things you should put on SSD to have best performance increase in Windows are EXACTLY: swap, temps, caches.
If you can squeeze, put boot files, and program files there too.

Leave HDD only for large data which is read sequentially (ie, videos, large documents etc).

Cheers

Actually one thing to speed up your SSD is to put your pagefile on a standard HD or disable it because the constant reads and writes of the pagefile from Windows will slow your SSD down.

 

[lemonadesoda]

NTFS has an attribute called Last Access Time, which tracks the last time the file was touched. That means even if all you are doing is reading a file, the system will have to do a write at the same time. You can disable this with the command:
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

Note that this might break some backup programs that use the Remote Storage service. You can reenable it with:
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 0

 

[extrasalty]

Hi,

Had to pass on this nugget. If you own a SSD (i've recently bought two OCZ Agility Drives(now in raid 0!)) the you know that space is limited and wear and tear should be avoided. You've already moved your temp folders and pagefile to a common HDD, along with your IE cache and Firefox profile.

You bought 2 SSDs and you moved your Firefox profile to regular hard drive!?

 

[Deleted member 3]

You can move most system folders around, can be done as simple in Vista/2008 as well. I have my desktop and some other folders on the network for easy access and easy wiping of my machine.

 

[Zedicus]

ssd's suck. 15000 rpm raid 5 SAS arrays FTW.

 

[lemonadesoda]

5 Intel SLC arrays FTW, or Super Talent RAIDDrive ES 768GB FTW.

Burst Speed (max) : Read 1.4GB/s, Write 1.2GB/s

 

[mcloughj]

You bought 2 SSDs and you moved your Firefox profile to regular hard drive!?

Yep. But then again I've always kept my firefox profile on a separate hdd.

 

[mcloughj]

I have my desktop and some other folders on the network for easy access and easy wiping of my machine.

Now that I never thought of doing... I have a NAS, but i'm using crappy wireless N networking. However moving my desktop to my NAS it could give me the incentive i need to run some cables around my house....

 

[niko084]

You can move most system folders around, can be done as simple in Vista/2008 as well. I have my desktop and some other folders on the network for easy access and easy wiping of my machine.

Now that's pretty slick thinking....

I might have to do that, thanks for the idea.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Now that I never thought of doing... I have a NAS, but i'm using crappy wireless N networking. However moving my desktop to my NAS it could give me the incentive i need to run some cables around my house....

I do this on a Gigabit LAN (reaching full Gigabit speeds). I would not recommend doing this on a wireless connection, unless you keep the folders you put on your network clean. I tend to drop huge files everywhere.

ssd's suck. 15000 rpm raid 5 SAS arrays FTW.

Yes, but no. Access times for SSD's are far lower, they make no sound and use far less power. My secondary system still has a 4 disk RAID 5 array with 15K U320 disks, very noisy and very hot.

 

[Cuzza]

Is this different to going to desktop properties and changing the location? And what's the good of not having your desktop on SSD? Other than keeping it away from the system partition which I always do anyway.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Is this different to going to desktop properties and changing the location? And what's the good of not having your desktop on SSD? Other than keeping it away from the system partition which I always do anyway.

Rightclick my documents > properties. Works in XP as well. In my case, it's sharing the desktop on multiple machines and easy backup. It saves a bit of space as well, which some SSD users don't have (only 70GB here), no harddisk.

 

[Cuzza]

OK, well I've got 64gb SSD in my laptop, nowhere to move it to anyway. I was just wondering.

 

[lemonadesoda]

^ upgrade your memory to max. Install a Ramdisk. Move temp folders (esp. internet) to the ramdisk. Will speed things up a heap... and automatically erase on shutdown.

 

[lemonadesoda]

Rightclick my documents > properties. Works in XP as well. In my case, it's sharing the desktop on multiple machines and easy backup. It saves a bit of space as well, which some SSD users don't have (only 70GB here), no harddisk.

Just as a warning to people who have more than one PC... if you log in to your desktop twice (or more) you could have all sorts of version control issues with files... and a risk of losing new versions of documents for older ones. You need to be disciplined and CLOSE APPLICATIONS DOWN before moving from one machine to the next. Even better if you log-off before switching machines.

This is even more problematic if you use a laptop and a desktop at the same time, esp. if you use them simultaneouesly like I do.

End of public service announcement.