Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, mac_h8r1, Nemesis
Flying Fox wrote:Unless we are talking about pre-Windows 7 OS (or prior than "whatever modern enough" Linux), what is there to optimize?
flip-mode wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx4twCK3_I&t=00m09sAccording to what you read around the Internet...
flip-mode wrote:I am going to channel a bit of Ryu using his post here:Flying Fox wrote:Unless we are talking about pre-Windows 7 OS (or prior than "whatever modern enough" Linux), what is there to optimize?
According to what you read around the Internet, there are a number of things. Have you read any optimization guides? And yes, they apply to Windows 7 and 8 too. Some of the suggestions are "controversial", such as turning off the pagefile, and then there are other optimizations that are not so controversial (tuning powercfg.exe, drive indexing, superfetch, prefetch, defrag, disk sleep, etc.)
May I ask what will that accomplish? Unless you have a Samsung SSD and you can actually under-provision space for reallocation, the empty space is going to be wasted?Also, you can provide additional spare area if you have the space by leave an extra portion of the disk un-partitioned. I have 200 GB of my 256 GB disk partitioned and have left the rest to spare area. This isn't hurting me at all since I am only using 25 gigs worth of the disk at the moment
Flying Fox wrote:flip-mode wrote:I am going to channel a bit of Ryu using his post here:Flying Fox wrote:Unless we are talking about pre-Windows 7 OS (or prior than "whatever modern enough" Linux), what is there to optimize?
According to what you read around the Internet, there are a number of things. Have you read any optimization guides? And yes, they apply to Windows 7 and 8 too. Some of the suggestions are "controversial", such as turning off the pagefile, and then there are other optimizations that are not so controversial (tuning powercfg.exe, drive indexing, superfetch, prefetch, defrag, disk sleep, etc.)
- Turning off pagefile - Don't kill the cute pandas please. SSD makes the pagefile fly which is good. I have plenty of free space in my X25-M for more than 2 years with a pagefile and my media wear count was unchanged. Granted I don't really run out of RAM myself.
- SuperFetch, prefetch, defrag, etc - presumably once Windows detect the SSD they will be turned off (from the linked post). Enabling Superfetch is still OK as files in RAM is are still going to be faster than an SSD; in fact Windows 8 turns it back on.
- Tuning powercfg.exe is mostly about turning off the hibernate file. I did that with my 120GB X25-M because: a) the SSD was small, b) I am behind a UPS so I have time to take the risk of power loss. This one may be worth looking into if you don't have enough money to get a large enough SSD. Then again, what is the context? We don't need all that tuning if the SSD is being put as the cache disk, no?
So assuming the OS in question is modern enough, most of the stuff is automatic already. Trying to tweak further seems too much trouble for gains (perceived or otherwise) that may not even matter to the user.May I ask what will that accomplish? Unless you have a Samsung SSD and you can actually under-provision space for reallocation, the empty space is going to be wasted?Also, you can provide additional spare area if you have the space by leave an extra portion of the disk un-partitioned. I have 200 GB of my 256 GB disk partitioned and have left the rest to spare area. This isn't hurting me at all since I am only using 25 gigs worth of the disk at the moment
JustAnEngineer wrote:flip-mode wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx4twCK3_I&t=00m09sAccording to what you read around the Internet...
Take what you read with a grain of salt.
flip-mode wrote:Regarding over-provisioning: http://www.matrix44.net/cms/wp-content/ ... ioning.pdf
I don't know if there are some disks that benefit and some that don't. I also don't know if there are different ways to configure it for different disks. I thought all that was necessary was to under-partition the disk, but maybe that's inaccurate. I suppose it's something each person has to look into for their specific disk.
Edit: the last paragraph here says this:
At least Samsung's SSD Magician software makes downloading and installing firmware updates a snap. This application can secure-erase drives and perform various system optimizations. It also features an overprovisioning tool that can increase the amount of NAND capacity used as "spare area" by the controller. Other SSDs allow their overprovisioning to be tweaked simply by creating a partition smaller than the total size of the drive, but kudos to Samsung for wrapping up this and other functionality in a tidy little app.
So it seems that some drives can be over-provisioned just by under-partitioning, but not my Samsung, I guess. :shrug:
Flying Fox wrote:So assuming the OS in question is modern enough, most of the stuff is automatic already.
flip-mode wrote:
Superfetch, prefetch, defrag: turned off automatically? Um, not according to my registry. Unless Windows ignores it's own registry (could be, I dunno) I had to change those settings in the registry and in services.
Turning of the hibernate file with powercfg: yeah, exactly!
Rand wrote:Prefatch, and Superfetch remain enabled but go into an 'idle' mode and effectively stop working. So manually disabling it won't make any difference.
Rand wrote:
The only change I made (and recommend) is disabling file indexing. SSD access times are sufficiently fast that the benefit of indexing the files is vanishingly small in search times, and the process of updating the index thrashes the drive with tons of small file writes.
Flying Fox wrote:flip-mode wrote:Also, you can provide additional spare area if you have the space by leave an extra portion of the disk un-partitioned. I have 200 GB of my 256 GB disk partitioned and have left the rest to spare area. This isn't hurting me at all since I am only using 25 gigs worth of the disk at the moment
May I ask what will that accomplish? Unless you have a Samsung SSD and you can actually under-provision space for reallocation, the empty space is going to be wasted?
flip-mode wrote:Edit: the last paragraph here says this:
At least Samsung's SSD Magician software makes downloading and installing firmware updates a snap. This application can secure-erase drives and perform various system optimizations. It also features an overprovisioning tool that can increase the amount of NAND capacity used as "spare area" by the controller. Other SSDs allow their overprovisioning to be tweaked simply by creating a partition smaller than the total size of the drive, but kudos to Samsung for wrapping up this and other functionality in a tidy little app.
So it seems that some drives can be over-provisioned just by under-partitioning, but not my Samsung, I guess. :shrug:
just brew it! wrote:Due to wear leveling, the partitions you create have no actual correspondence to locations in the physical flash array. If that space never gets "touched" by the OS, the wear leveling algorithm should effectively treat it as spare cells.
Whether or not this will make a meaningful difference in SSD lifetime in actual use is a separate discussion.
Rand wrote:flip-mode wrote:
Superfetch, prefetch, defrag: turned off automatically? Um, not according to my registry. Unless Windows ignores it's own registry (could be, I dunno) I had to change those settings in the registry and in services.
Turning of the hibernate file with powercfg: yeah, exactly!
With Win7 Defrag Windows should automatically disable defragging for SSD's. If it isn't doing that then Windows isn't recognizing that you even have a SSD enabled for some reason.
Prefatch, and Superfetch remain enabled but go into an 'idle' mode and effectively stop working. So manually disabling it won't make any difference.
The only change I made (and recommend) is disabling file indexing. SSD access times are sufficiently fast that the benefit of indexing the files is vanishingly small in search times, and the process of updating the index thrashes the drive with tons of small file writes.
CB5000 wrote:For my samsung 840 pro defrag wasn't disabled automatically on windows 7. It still had defrag scheduled by default... It probably depends on the SSD. I did disable superfetch, indexing, and defrag though since they were samsung's reccomendations, and the 840 pro is fast enough that superfetch barely makes a difference.
DPete27 wrote:I didn't read through every comment but:
1) Before installing the SSD, make sure your mobo storage controller is set to AHCI (follow these instructions if you forgot to do this).
2) Right-click "My Computer" => Properties => Run Windows Experience Index when you first install the SSD. I've read that this is how W7 detects the SSD to do it's automatic settings like turning off defrag.
3) I also turn off hibernate (explanation in linked article above) since boot times are so fast on SSDs.
churin wrote:Thank you very much for your reply.
The storage controllers for my main desktop pc and HTPC mentioned in my earlier post are set to AHCI, but the Dell Latitude C840 I am going to install SDD on has IDE only. I assume that SSD still works with IDE but not as efficiently with AHCI.
just brew it! wrote:That's a complete non-starter. The C840 is EIDE only; SATA SSDs are not physically (connectors) or electrically (disk controller interface) compatible with it.
Edit: You might be able to get a SATA drive adapter to go into one of the laptop's expansion bays; but even with this you probably won't have TRIM support.
DPete27 wrote:If you can't enable AHCI mode (and therefore can't enable TRIM) it would be best to get a sandforce SSD IMO. They make use of on-the-fly compression to lower write amplification which should not be affected by the storage controller on the mobo. Also, (IIRC) the sandforce controller has it's own internal form of garbage collection that operates independently of TRIM. Win, Win
Flying Fox wrote:Can you even fit the adapter physically inside the laptop chassis?