Ssd Essential Knowledge Request For Newcomers.

I'm seriously impressed with the difference in performance after going SSD. I mean, not only does the PC fully boot in about 30 seconds (used to take 3 mins +/-) but I also just installed Heaven Benchmark and it took about 10 seconds. It's only about 250mb but all that in 10 secs is QUICK!

Anyway now its time I made sure I'm doing everything right in the SSD world. I've read some tweak guides but there's still some blanks that need filling, for example:-

1. Disabling 'System Protection' is recommended often but System Restore is also under this dialogue panel, so it's not clear if disabling protection will also disable SysRestore. Google wasn't my friend but I do NOT want to disable Restore (obvious reasons!)

2.Following that: Disabling System Restore on SSDs is also recommended (wait, WHAT?)

3. People recommend enabling 'optimise drives' but sadly its a Win8 tool. Any Win7 equivalent?

4. Disabling 'Windows Search' is suggested, but I like the ability to search with diff criteria like tags, date, format etc. Turning it off seems counter-intuitive, UNLESS my search app (Everything) works fine with indexing & WinSearch disabled.

I've done a few seemingly risk free tweaks already but I want to get everything right. I still need to learn about TRIM and Overprisioning and such.

If any experienced SSD'ers can confirm or deny any of this, I'd really appreciate it! Share your thoughts on best practices and the like; anything that Solid Noob should absolutely know!

The SSD Guides section onWww.thessdreview.com are a great read so far, but a bit deep for my current level of "awakeness" (Awakeness? Lol). Saved for later!

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to share the essential knowledge!

 

You did not tell us anything about your computer - in particular, the OS. If using W7, W8 or especially W10, just leave it alone! They already know how to use and manage SSDs just fine without users dinking with settings!

1. & 2. System Protection uses System Restore, so these go together. No one I know recommends disabling System Protection or System Restore. Why would you do that? SR is a valuable tool to "restore" the computer to a previous state. It has NOTHING to do with SSD performance unless you are running critically low on disk space, and then Windows and SR are smart enough to purge older Restore points to free up space, and even disable SR if necessary to prevent further disk usage if about it run out of free space. But that is not the solution. The solution is to free up space! To uninstall unneeded programs, to move space hogging data to another drive, and/or buy more disk space - the EXACT SAME thing regardless if SSD or HD.

3. No one I know recommends disabling "Optimize Drives". Again, why would you do that? This suggestion probably stems from their ignorance and being stuck in the past!!!! Because of the way data is accessed on SSDs, you don't "defrag" SSDs. Windows "Optimize Drives" is the feature (formally called Disk Defragmenter) that also defrags "hard" drives. But again, Windows is smart enough to recognize if a connected drive is a hard drive (which needs periodic defragging) or a SSD, which never needs defragging. So when Windows detects a SSD, Optimize Drives disables defragging on the SSD. But it still enables other essential SSD maintenance tasks - like TRIM.

4. No one I know who knows anything about modern versions of Windows recommends disabling Windows Search. Those who do are stuck in the past. Modern versions of Windows are not XP so they need to stop treating these modern versions of Windows like XP. What was necessary with XP is probably detrimental to performance on modern Windows. Contrary to what some seem to believe, Microsoft has not been sitting on their thumbs for the last 15 years since XP came out. And it is in the best interest of Microsoft that Windows uses the hardware it is running on optimally. So all the PhDs, computer scientists and other eggheads at Microsoft with their $millions in super computers have been analyzing decades worth and exabytes (billions of gigabytes) of empirical data just to ensure the Windows 10 fully utilizes the latest state-of-the-art hardware to its maximum capabilities. And they are darn good at it!

FTR, I have not used hard drives in any of my builds for the OS or installed applications for the last 3 years. The only hard drives I have are used in my back up devices, and for mass storage of copies of my 600+ music CDs. Also FTR, I never use any of the programs that many SSD makers include with their SSDs. For example, I primarily use Samsung SSDs and I never use Samsung Magician. Why? Because again, W10 already knows how to use SSDs just fine. There is no need for another "man-in-the-middle" wasting system resources.

So my advice for everyone considering SSDs is to install them, don't dink with them, then enjoy them.

 

Yea sorry I forgot the details lol. I'm running Win7 Ultimate 64bit on a clean 850 Evo right now and I ran the command line to check if the TRIM operation was active (came up positive).

1&2: Exactly, disabling Restore/Protection sounds like a good way to set yourself up for a bad fall. The recommendations on that came from SSDReviews.com and a couple of Recent threads but I definitely haven't followed that advice!

3. Thanks, that's all I needed to hear! I'm on Win7 anyway so I can't enable Optimise Drives but you're right, it seems like a no brainier to enable it. The suggestion was to enable it BTW.

4. Yea, I'll be leaving Win search & indexing on then.

All I've done so far is (SSD only): Disabled hibernation using the 'powercfg command line; Disabled write caching and shrank the page file to a range of 512-1024mb. It used to be equal to my RAM at 8gb (way too big for a 120gb drive IMO!).

I actually jumped on the wagon and grabbed Samsung Magician in the end (despite my reservations after reading it was nothing but bloatware). Mainly I wanted to benchmark my 850 Evo but when I realised it wanted to take an hour for more, I just cancelled it. I'll do it at some point when I can leave it to do its thing. I wanted to make sure the Evo was hooked up to the SATA-3 port with best SATA controller (My Asrock Z170 K4/D3 doesn't specify whether one port is 'better', controller wise, than the other (atleast, the manual & webpage don't specify) so maybe all the SATA-3 ports use the same controller). Apparently some boards have 1-2 ports with high quality controllers, while the other SATA3 ports use cheap, slower controllers (I guess it's cutting corners to save money. for shame...).

I understand your views on programs like Magician. I myself was pretty dubious about it but I decided to give it a once over, just incase there WAS some actual native functionality that couldn't be achieved within Windows. A feature on Magician that I don't have on Win7 is 'Optimise Drives', (a Win8 feature) however, that's only if Samsung & Win8's Optimise Drive's are the same thing. The other feature is 'Overprovisioning'. I haven't seen this in Win7 anywhere yet (device manager, drive properties, disk manager etc) but again, if I seriously don't need this program and all those functions are already part of Win7, I'll be saying goodbye!

Cheers.

 

Just a point on the command line TRIM check - that only checks whether TRIM is enabled in the OS, TRIM also requires suitable AHCI drivers to be installed. Windows (W7/8/10) default drivers are fine, some 3rd party versions, even Intel's, are variable - some do, some don't! http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#trim

TRIMcheck or Hard Disk Sentinel will test if TRIM is active.

 

Are you a computer scientist? Do you have a PhD in memory management? Do you have super computers and decades worth of empirical data at your disposal telling you how best to configure Windows? I personally have a bunch of certs, two IT degrees and decades of experience in the IT support industry building and configuring and maintaining computers and I'm not that smart to second guess the Microsoft professionals. Performance is a top priority for the MS OS development teams, second only to security. It is highly unlikely your computer and your computing habits puts you outside the "normal" range, beyond the 90-95% of the vast majority of us sitting in the middle. Only extreme users really need to change the defaults - and only then, after careful analysis if they want it done right - AND periodic re-analysis and adjustments as necessary.

I see no reason to disable write caching. I also see no reason to change the PF settings, unless running critically low on disk space. And I see no reason to dink with over-provisioning with current generation SSDs. Unless you are a bona fide and highly educated expert in computers and memory management AND you have done a complete and thorough analysis of how your system uses its resources for the tasks you regularly perform, then please, don't dink with the settings! When you dink with the settings, unless you are such an expert, you pretty much insure you will degrade performance.

When you disable write caching, for every write to the disk, the computer goes into a "wait state" while the system waits for the disk to select and access the correct location on the disk, write the data, then wait some more for the acknowledgment to the OS that the write was completed successfully. Why would you want to hobble disk and computer performance like that???? Even with an SSD?

When write caching enabled, the data is dumped into the drive's own cache then immediately the acknowledgement is sent back to the OS that all is good and the OS can move on to the next task. Simultaneously, the drive's own logic circuits then take over to complete the write. That's how it is supposed to be and that is why caching is enabled by default.

The only time it makes sense to disable write caching is with removable drives - where there is a chance the user will disconnect the drive before the write is complete.

As far as dinking with the PF settings, I said above in bold letters, "Modern versions of Windows are not XP so they [users] need to stop treating these modern versions of Windows like XP. What was necessary with XP is probably detrimental to performance on modern Windows." Just let Windows manage your PF. It knows how to do it very well. If you are so critically low on disk space, then you need to move some programs to a different drive, uninstall programs you installed you don't need, or buy a bigger drive.

"Manually" setting the PF size is NOT a "set and forget" task. Programs change. User computing tasks and habits change. Therefore a computer's virtual memory usage changes too. This is exactly why a Windows managed PF is "dynamic" - its size adjusts as needed. And for sure, the size of the drive is NOT a criteria in the determination of the PF size!

As for over-provisioning - same thing! Current generation SSDs do not suffer from the limitations encountered in first generation SSDs. Therefore, for most users in most scenarios, you don't have to dink with the settings! Your SSD, straight from the factory most likely will outlast the rest of the your entire computer! But more importantly, beginning with the 840 Series, Samsung enabled overprovisioning in the drives already. So your even newer generation 850 already has it! Samsung SSD White Paper: Maximize SSD Lifetime and Performance With Over-Provisioning.

You express you are concerned with the amount of space you have on this SSD so you manually set a small PF, an action that does nothing to improve performance, any may potentially hinder it. Then you want to consume extra disk space on this SSD by [apparently] increasing a chunk of SSD dedicated for more over-provisioning you don't need! ??? See the irony there?

There is no need to manually disable hibernation. On PCs (unlike notebooks) Windows does not use hibernation. It uses Hybrid mode - which is a GREAT!!!! feature that enables faster wakes from sleep mode. - a good thing!

Lastly, you need to consider letting W7 go. It is already pushing 7 years old! W10 is faster, build for SSDs and other current state-of-the-art hardware, and is more secure (reason enough to upgrade). On the downside, the upgrade will initially eat up a bunch of your disk space, but once certain the upgrade went well, you can manually delete the windows.old folder to free up that extra space (or just wait 30 days and it will be deleted automatically).

 

Thanks for the valuable info Digerati.

 

Thanks.

You know, I was talking with a colleague and this topic (changing Windows defaults) came up. Modern versions of Windows are kinda like modern cars compared to cars from yesteryear. Back in the day there was all kinds of things you could do to a vehicle engine to make it perform better. You could swap in a bigger 4-barrel carburetor, install dual exhaust or even headers, change the timing and more - in addition to fancy paint jobs, extra chrome here and there and other aesthetic things - all without being a mechanical engineer. I used to literally climb into the engine compartment to work on the 350ci V8 in my 1969 Chevy pickup. But today, cars are so sophisticated, advanced, and safe and efficient, you dink with anything under the hood (if you can find it!) and you likely are to mess things up - or at least, not make it perform any better.

Same with modern Windows. You can certainly customize the appearance and aesthetics, but under the hood the OS has become so sophisticated and advanced, you dink with something and you are likely to mess things up (or again, not make it better). Like cars today, the "programming" makes "dynamic" adjustments based on how the program (or vehicle) is being used (driven). No manual tweaking required - except in how it looks. And that's a good thing - except maybe for those of us who grew up in and miss the old days and can no longer get our hands dirty.

 

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