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Otimizer for SSD

C

carlmart

Gawd
Joined
Sep 17, 2006
Messages
691
As I have just bought an SSD, I am trying to learn something about them.

Today I was reading these suggestions, though in this case addressed at Mac's owners, which is not my case.

http://blog.alutam.com/2012/04/01/optimizing-macos-x-lion-for-ssd/

Two things caught my attention:

1) The advice on not running Benchmark tests, as they are not good for the drive.

2) The Trim Enabler SSD optimizer.

Is that advice to be taken seriously?

Is there something similar to the TE for PCs?
 
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2069761

generally TRIM is turned on if freshly formatted, Defragging is turned off, but there are a couple things to do to keep it running best.

make sure TRIM is running/enabled
AHCI mode
defrag off, or at least never used on SSD, its not needed and can hurt the drives "life"
indexing/compression is very rarely needed and can hurt overall performance most times for most drives.
prefetch-superfetch not really needed

Generally speaking, things like favorites, and info that constantly changes is best to be avoided, static information that is rarely moved/changed/deleted/written is best to be on SSD, for everything else, its best to put on a mechanical drive.

I use Ccleaner to "scrub" info that gets put into drive by windows and general system usage, I defrag once per month, Ccleaner once every week or so, saves alot of space, and keeps my 60gb OS SSD zippy since the day I got it.

Benchmarking is ok, if you do it once or twice, but just like defragging, benchmarking is really not beneficial to an SSD performance/life, as the cells can only be erased/written so many times before they lose capacity/speed, so anything you can do to make sure that does not happen, the better, TRIM and garbage collection do very well to help this(very rare these work properly in RAID for anything but the newest drives though) but it is up to the user to watch how they use the drive.

It would be like taking a formula 1 car onto the highway, I am sure it can handle it, but there are much better tools for the job, not to mention safer ways of getting to highway speeds lol.
 
I'm sorry for the questions I'm about to make, but I don't know what some terms you use mean. What I don't know is where I set those up or down, except for AHCI.

What TRIM is that?

What defrag are you talking about?

AHCI I know, is something to enable/disable on initial setup.

What's indexing/compression?

What's prefetch-superfetch?

What favorites are those you talk about? The only favorites I know are the "Bookmarks" in Mozila or IE.

How do I control where constantly changing info go, so it does not go through the SSD? Some of them I have control of, but things like temporary web garbage and all that I'm not sure how to manage it.

Apparently TRIM and Garbage Collection are programs, right?
 
carlmart said:
How do I control where constantly changing info go, so it does not go through the SSD? Some of them I have control of, but things like temporary web garbage and all that I'm not sure how to manage it.
Click to expand...

You want this type of stuff on your SSD. That's where they give you your big improvements. You really aren't going to wear out the SSD with typical usage.

If you have Windows 7 or 8, TRIM is automatic. Garbage collection is also automatic. You don't need to do anything here.
 
Just install it and use it. You really don't have to optimize anything. Just don't use 3rd party defragmenters on it (even they disable defrag for SSD automatically). Page file, temps, caches...anything like that is great to have on SSD. Superfetch and similar are ok, because memory is still an order of magnitude faster than SSD and useless if not used anyway. The only thing that isn't useful on SSD is large static data like movies and music.
 
Thanks, I will be using this SSD with Windows 7, and all large files, like movies or music, will be on HDDs.

And I will not defragment... ;)
 
TRIM is supposed to be enabled by default its not hard to verify if it is "working"
http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86403

Typical usage, however alot of folks are used to using mechanical drives, SSD overall are quite good at everything, though depending on what drive it is and such will also tell if it should be used for certain types of information(advanced) i.e compressed or non compressible data.
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SSD will retain thier performance longer if stuff that is not constantly changing is not on the drive, most data is fine as it does not change much. All in all, it truly depends on the drive, what it is used for, and how much % of the drive is being used. The more room that is left on the drive the easier it is for the drive to maintain its speed and available capacity, SSD by nature will move things around as stuff is opened and closed(just by using programs/data) this is why it is very important not to benchmark much if at all except to see if it is working as it should, and also not to use defrag EVER on SSD.

Windows(Vista-7-8) auto loads alot into memory in the first place(I have prefecth and superfecth tunred off and still quite a bit is auto allocated anyways, and no performance difference that I have noticed, at least it only loads what it needs to, not what it think I need) having a decent size paging file is part of this, usually 1.5-4x the total installed memory for the initial and max paging file size, usually windows handles this well enough, however, there are times I have seen that windows allocates far far to much in paging file size and this can be troublesome for many reasons. SSD like mentioned, need to and do move things around when they open and close things, the more information that is erased/written the more this happens, and the less TRIM and garbage collection are able to do thier thing the way they need to. So it is beneficial to limit paging file size.
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Anyways, SSD benefit from 4k sector format, small size files/folders as it is easier for them to go through things, certain things like favorites(bookmarks) pictures and the like do not truly benefit from SSD anyways, so it doesnt hurt to move them to a standard hard drive to save space, and keep the speed longer. Some games especially the ones that have alot of loading and such to do they gain a massive advantage on being used from an SSD, but overall, its the operating system itself the core, not the extras, that see the biggest advantage.

Anything that is easily accessed from the SSD data banks(bootup, general windows things, some games, and the like) see the largest benefit, where some things simply see next to none.
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Defrag is any defragger, the one built into windows included. They just move around to much to organize it, SSD do not need things in specific cells, they can read from where they want when they want, its just a bad idea to force anything around, as TRIM and garbage collection decides what it needs to do, simple as that.

There are ways to optimize performance, but most of those ways are not automatically done for you by any tool available, its the user that needs to move things, not use certain things, let the drive do its thing, and give it enough space for this purpose(usually 20% or so is fine so for my 55gb usuable 60gb drive I would be best to leave at minimum 11gb untouched for performance/life reasons, I usually am 15=20gb available space due to having moved some things to my mechancial, cleaning regularly to stop OS "bloating" etc)
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best of luck, hope it works well for you.
what is TRIM---garbage collection---disk indexing--compression talk
 
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