Optimizing SSD

[MikeJeng]

I just recently purchased an OCZ Vertex 2 drive and I finished installing windows on it. I've been reading several articles and reviews stating that some changes should be made to maximize space and performance.

Here are things that I have done:
1. Put in AHCI
2. Disabled Hibernate
3. Disabled System Restore
4. Disabled Defragging

What else can I do to save space? The drive is 60GB. I have about 40GB left over.
I also heard that I should move my pagefile to a separate disk. How do I do this? (I have a 500GB storage drive)
Also, since the drive has no moving parts I assume the orientation doesn't matter. It's sitting upside down and diagonal. This won't affect anything will it?

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

you could also turn off superfetch in the services list under computer admin in control panel and user indexing too and to move your pagefile just goto system in control panel then click advanced properties then clck on performance settings click on advanced then clck page file tab and set your ssd to no page file and fix your page file manually on another hdd
to 9600-9600 or 3 times your memmory done

 

[erocker]

You should really check ocz's website. They have lots of guides especially for the Vertex II on what to do. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...rtex2-Agility2-EX-Drives-REVO-and-HSDL-drives

 

[Octopuss]

I think superfetch etc is automatically turned off for that drive when system finds out it's a SSD, no?

What about partition alignment? I read about this thing somewhere and still don't understand jack. What they say is that you don't need to worry about it when you use Windows 7, but does it also apply if you create more than one partition on a SSD?

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

Don't assume anything is automatically disabled for an SSD. Always check yourself. Windows seems really spotty about that.

 

[DanishDevil]

This is my FAVORITE link for SSDs.

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=82516

I did everything but disabling system restore points, and did stuff for Firefox instead of IE. I use this on my desktop, and it's a dream.

 

[Laurijan]

I just recently purchased an OCZ Vertex 2 drive and I finished installing windows on it. I've been reading several articles and reviews stating that some changes should be made to maximize space and performance.

Here are things that I have done:
1. Put in AHCI
2. Disabled Hibernate
3. Disabled System Restore
4. Disabled Defragging

What else can I do to save space? The drive is 60GB. I have about 40GB left over.
I also heard that I should move my pagefile to a separate disk. How do I do this? (I have a 500GB storage drive)
Also, since the drive has no moving parts I assume the orientation doesn't matter. It's sitting upside down and diagonal. This won't affect anything will it?

I would leave the pagefile on the SSD since it the fastest drive. But you could make the pagefile smaller - monitor the usage peaks while you play for example the heaviest game you have and then set the size to manually to this peak value.
I would set the pagefile start size and end size to the same MB value since then the pagefile has a fixed size and is not made bigger and bigger according to load.

 

[sliderider]

I would leave the pagefile on the SSD since it the fastest drive. But you could make the pagefile smaller - monitor the usage peaks while you play for example the heaviest game you have and then set the size to manually to this peak value.
I would set the pagefile start size and end size to the same MB value since then the pagefile has a fixed size and is not made bigger and bigger according to load.

Actually it is a better idea to try to relocate it to another drive. Solid state memory devices are limited in the number of read-write cycles before they begin to degrade so you want to access that drive as little as possible. Every time Windows accesses the pagefile it reduces the life of the drive. A physical hard drive can better stand up to this usage. Prices on SSD's may have come down a lot in recent years, but they're hardly the throw away devices that normal hard drives have become.

 

[t_ski]

There was an SSD optimizer that helped boost performance, but it looks like you are just trying to save space. Basicly, install everything to the storage drive that you can, keep any music on the storage drive and point back to it in iTunes or whatever, keep your browser cache low, and put your swapfile on the storage drive.

 

[Octopuss]

Actually it is a better idea to try to relocate it to another drive. Solid state memory devices are limited in the number of read-write cycles before they begin to degrade so you want to access that drive as little as possible. Every time Windows accesses the pagefile it reduces the life of the drive. A physical hard drive can better stand up to this usage. Prices on SSD's may have come down a lot in recent years, but they're hardly the throw away devices that normal hard drives have become.

Might not be true nowadays.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

 

[t_ski]

Performance-wise, yes, the pagefile would be better on an SSD. But I believe the original post refers to saving space, not boosting performance.