Guide for SSD Tweaks?

perrosky

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 31, 2009
Messages
169
I have my Intel ssd G2 installed and working (latest firmware in) runing in AHCI MODE
but I'm not getting the speed that most of you guys are posting. So I was thinking if there is any guide or sticky in how to tweak your SSD in W7 to get the best speed/performance out of it.

Another thing is that the benchmark vary from 1 hour to another last night I ran a benchmark, I Don't know if this is normal.

CristalDiskMark2.2

Yesterday
SEQ 249.5 | 85.84
512K 188.0 | 85.78
4K 16.32 | 52.64
READ |WRITE

Today Benchmark

SEQ 251.7 | 85.81
512k 193.9 | 86.13
4k 14.95 | 52.02
[READ[MB/s] WRITE[MB/s]
 
I don't see any variation here. Only the margin of error of any test.
 
try the ocztechnology support forums. there is a lot of good info on setting up SSD drives properly over there.
 
Your results seem fine, don't get into much tweaking. Just disable defragment.
 
everything is fine... your 4k writes are little slower than mine, but your seq. reads are higher than mine.

systems vary.
 
You should NOT have to mess around with a lot of Windows tweaks in order to get the proper performance out of your drive, so before messing around too much I'd try some basic diagnostics to make sure everything is properly set up (properly aligned partition, etc.). That being said, performance seems fine from what you've posted.

Windows should automatically disable defragging on that drive and you can disable Hibernate if you don't use it much, since it'll save you a good chunk of drive space. All data spread/cached thru your 12GB of RAM has to be saved to disk when you suspend the machine, so the hiberfil file will probably be close to 12GB in size.

Beyond that I wouldn't really bother to mess w/the page file, indexing, or any of the other things people used to do w/early gen SSD, it's just unnecessary and chances are it won't have a noticeable impact on performance. Windows 7 manages that stuff just fine.
 
What about prefetch and superfetch? I changed a couple registry values from 3 to 0 according to some Windows 7 SSD tweak guide. Should I set them back to defaults?

I read that 7 is supposed to disable them on most SSD's, but the registry showed them as enabled. Does it passively disable them for the SSD in some hidden way?
 
The tweaks at OCZ are not OCZ hardware specific. The tweaks aren't needed for any gen2 SSDs, but many of them are useful. If you have some information that I missed, please explain why the SSD tweaks at OCZ's forum will not work on Intel or other manufacturer drives.

Jason
 
In the sports-car tuning scene, we'd call you guys dyno-queens. You are kvetching over a fluctuation in your top-end numbers that have nothing to do with real-world performance or experience.

Top end benchmarks on SSD mean next to nothing.
 
^good analogy...
only a 50-100% better performance in the right areas would give noticeable improvements, really :D
No win tweak will actually matter much, except give you that clean/all tweaked expensive machine feeling. :D
 
I'll just add, benchmarks are useful for making an initial decision which products are worthwhile. And then for determining if you have misconfiguration errors on your system, by noting substantial differences between your results and other users. But worrying about a couple tens of MB/s on sequential read/write (which matter very little anyways) is foolish.

That being said, I have done substantial tweaking on my SSDs. The main thing is that I have dedicated some of my 6GB of RAM on my desktop to a RAMDRIVE, which I use for scratch space. Many programs are written under an older paradigm and write lots of things to files (disk). For example, all of my browser cache is on the RAMDISK, and several other "noisy" programs. (My Virus Scanner likes doing constant small writes to a log file.)

The benefit to eliminating these small file writes is 1) less partially-filled blocks, less need for TRIM solutions. and 2) reducing wear on the MLC FLASH. Of these two considerations, the second is much less important, given the finite, but long life of MLC FLASH.
 
What about prefetch and superfetch? I changed a couple registry values from 3 to 0 according to some Windows 7 SSD tweak guide. Should I set them back to defaults?

I read that 7 is supposed to disable them on most SSD's, but the registry showed them as enabled. Does it passively disable them for the SSD in some hidden way?

That's what one MS dev said during a Q&A regarding Win7 and SSDs, pre-release, I can look up the link if ya want... But I don't know if that decision was actually final, the article dates months before Win7 was ever released or even RTM. Frankly I never understood the reasoning for it either...

All Superfetch does is copy often-used stuff to RAM (which is still far faster than any SSD), so I don't see how it could have an impact on the performance or durability of an SSD... Unless it's somehow able to choke a SSD by trying to cache stuff when the SSD is busy w/other IO operations, but I doubt that (if Superfetch did that, it'd choke regular HDs all the same). It's possible it just doesn't copy over stuff from the SSD itself but still caches stuff from regular HDs tho, might be worth testing (the defragment service works like that IIRC).

Regardless, I'd leave those settings alone, the only reason I can think of that they would consider disabling SF on SSD drives would be that the speed difference between loading most apps from RAM vs an SSD is not noticeable to most users (even if there's still a difference), so SF is sorta redundant to them, but I'm sure it'd still be relevant w/heavy apps like Photoshop, VMs, etc.
 
The whole durability issue is moot IMO...
If it's faster with it on leave it be...
 
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