W7 and SSD

S

sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 23, 2006
Messages
1,206
I have read quite a bit about W7 optimizations for SSD devices... specifcally according to Microsoft, for drives that "advertise themselves as SSD."

Any idea how to verify that Windows 7 indeed believes a particular storage device is solid state and therefore is disabling auto defrag, prefetch etc etc.?
 
there's probably an internal flag of some sort but why can't you believe what MS says? :D
 
believe what MS says, lol good one :p

Anyway it's in ssd's firmware the device lets the os know it's a ssd not hdd
 
axan said:
Anyway it's in ssd's firmware the device lets the os know it's a ssd not hdd
Click to expand...

Do you have a source for that? Or did you just state it as a fact because it sounded like it made sense?

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=10
"First, a TRIM-supporting OS (e.g. Windows 7 will support TRIM at some point) queries the hard drive for its rotational speed. If the drive responds by saying 0, the OS knows it’s a SSD and turns off features like defrag. It also enables the use of the TRIM command."
 
Well, I am running the retail version of W7 x64 and it picked up my Intel G2 SSD just fine. It disabled defrag for my SSD drive automatically. It wont look like it disabled anything until you click on schedule and then click on select disks and you will not see your SSD drive in the list of disks to be defragmented. I can only assume that W7 also implemented the other SSD optimized features.
 
Drives are popping up with TRIM support, it has yet to be seen if Win7 TRIM actually works. The specs for it weren't finalized for RC1 which was why vendors were waiting for the RTM version before working on new firmware revisions. Now Intel hasn't released their's, but Indilinix has.
 
I don't think TRIM has been activated, however I checked almost immediately after I installed Windows 7 Enterprise x64, and Windows 7 did have defrag, prefetch, etc. turned off on my Intel G2 80-gig SSD.

I had to manually turn off the "hyber.sys" file and the "pagefile.sys" from one of MS webpage can actually be put onto another hard drive due to the way "pagefile.sys" works it doesn't need to be on the SSD. I haven't move "pagefile.sys" yet since I have no idea how, but all other features or disabled features, had not been detrimental to my Windows 7 SSD system.
 
I just got the SSD today. What do I need to do before and after I install the OS on the drive? Also, is it possible to restore what I have on my backup onto the SSD so I dont have to reinstall everything? FYI, the backup is done through windows so it backs up my data and the whole OS itself.
 
With the questions most of you have over Windows 7 and the Intel SSD drives you should read the links below.

Intel SSD Frequently Asked Questions???

http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029623.htm

Engineering Windows 7

http://blogs.msdn.com/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."

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

"As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment."
 
Blk02 said:
With the questions most of you have over Windows 7 and the Intel SSD drives you should read the links below.

*snip*

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."

*snip*
Click to expand...

Ugh, sorry about that I read that page too and swear it said put it on another drive, probably read it on another forum and it must have cancelled that out. :D

And to PHiZ, I see you actually brought something meaningful to the discussion, oh wait... At least with my error, Blk02 was quick to point out my comment was in fact an error.
 
tronmaster said:
Ugh, sorry about that I read that page too and swear it said put it on another drive, probably read it on another forum and it must have cancelled that out. :D
Click to expand...

I agree that you probably saw the pagefile thing on a different "SSD recommendations" page/forum. I remember reading about moving the page file for XP/Vista SSD recommendations out there somewhere, but I had already read the Windows Team blog and knew better ;)
 
tronmaster said:
And to PHiZ, I see you actually brought something meaningful to the discussion, oh wait... At least with my error, Blk02 was quick to point out my comment was in fact an error.
Click to expand...

Not an error. A fundamental ignorance in regards to page files.

One recipe for page files, shrink and then disable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top