Windows 7 tweaks for SSD's

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jasondean98

Limp Gawd
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Aug 22, 2007
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Can you guys suggest any good guides for what I should enable/disable in order to get the best performance out of my SSD.

I've installed Windows 7 RC1 (64 bit) on it, with all my programs on my 150Gb velociraptor and it feels sluggish!

It's an OCZ Core V2, I couldn't quite afford the vertex (boring stuff like mortgage, bills and food got in the way!:D)

thanks in advance
 
Good luck with the core, I am running windows 7 too, and got pretty good performance by just:
-creating the partition with windows 7 installer to get proper alignment
-disable defrag service and indexing service

That's it. (I personally don't really believe in turning off superfetch, but some people think that helps also.)
 
So, does windows 7 align the drive correctly by default now,as I've read you need to do it manually regardless of OS.

Please correct me if this is wrong information!
 
Ok, I just set the page file on a different drive (which freed up 8GB!), is this likely to help or hinder performance?
 
google OCZ Vista Tweaks, it applies for 7 as well.

Core V2 uses a JMicron Controller 602B which is basically to JM's under raid0, so you should align it at 128kb offset for best performance.

What you are basically trying to do is limit the small random writes made into the SSD to avoid the stuttering. The fact you have a velociraptor will help, you can simply move a lot of that stuff (IE caching, Temp Files, Pagefile, etc) to the raptor.

You will need to do a bit of register tweaks as well to increase overall performance.
 
I just followed the guide in the OCZ forum, so hopefully it'll speed things up a bit!

cheers
 
jasondean98 said:
Ok, I just set the page file on a different drive (which freed up 8GB!), is this likely to help or hinder performance?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure an 8GB pagefile is necessary, but page-file operations are predominantly 4k reads and sequential writes, with a 40 to 1 ratio of reads to writes, which should be very SSD friendly (both performance-wise, and the fact that it is unlikely to reduce your SSDs lifespan much).
 
I followed the OCZ forum tweaks to the letter and am very happy with my rig. I do not miss the pagefile and have found that the 1 GB ramdisk for IE temp files to be the biggest performance gainer yet. I would do that even if I was using HDDs
 
iceredwing said:
Core V2 uses a JMicron Controller 602B which is basically to JM's under raid0, so you should align it at 128kb offset for best performance.
Click to expand...
Uh, no. The 602B fixed problems with data corruption found in the original 602 controller (and the original OCZ Core SSD). Their are drives which have 2 JM602B controllers in them (the Apex and the Titan, maybe others?) for the RAID0 effect you describe. The Core V2 is not one of them.
 
Maybe it's my imagination, but i'm sure my velociraptor was faster as a boot drive!

Should i cut my losses and sell the OCZ core and get an OCZ Vertex? Would i notice a significant increase in performance?

Cheers!
 
If you can find someone to buy the core, and can afford the vertex, then YES. The vertex is light years ahead of the core and corev2 series.
 
What do you mean? Do you mean in particular, boot times, or general desktop performance?

If its the former, it's fairly imperceptible. Say 40 seconds vs 50 seconds--you're either spacing out or doing something else while you wait for the computer to boot up.

If its the latter, the OCZ Core series uses a JMicron JMF602B controller, which has write latency 10 times worse than a 4200rpm hard drive. An OCZ Vertex is absolutely faster, on a scale of hundreds of times faster for desktop use. The real strength of SSDs is multitasking performance (say, launching several applications simultaneously, or running virus check while surfing and unraring some files).

For single tasking, it would be fairly difficult to tell the difference in my opinion. I have 3 instances of Windows 7 on different hard drives (among lots of other OSes on my bootloader), and differences in light desktop use between a good SSD and a Raptor are imperceptible. Part of the reason is Windows 7 has extremely aggressive indexing and fetching services that makes application load typically instantaneous anyway. Can you tell the difference between Firefox loading in 2 seconds vs 1.5 second? Probably not.

Have you read this article? This might clear up why your OCZ Core feels slow (because it is!)

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=17
 
Thanks for the link, I wish i'd done more research before I bought it!

I just listed the OCZ Core on ebay au, so hopefully I'll get most of my money back towards a Vertex!
 
What size Vertex would you be looking at? If you are looking for the cutting edge, the Intel X25-M is still the way to go.
 
Of course I'm a big minority here since I'm measuring the extreme--difference between the Intel and OCZ Vertex is like 2 frames per second in Crysis :p
 
hmz said:
Major pain in the ass. They should come up with some kind of install fix or smth. I would just disable indexing and defrag..
Click to expand...

My windows 7 install did that for me, the tweaks only take a few minutes and will help with longevity.
 
Just got my 60GB Vertex, holy crap it's fast!!:D:D:D

The Core V2 was piss poor compared to this drive!
 
I looked at the OCZ forum link...

I'm not sure I am ready to follow any of it, because it looks like their very first tweak is flat out wrong. (If I'm understanding other sources correctly)

So here's what SuperFetch is:
Windows SuperFetch enables programs and files to load much faster than they would on Windows XP–based PCs.

When you're not actively using your computer, background tasks—including automatic backup programs and antivirus scans—run when they will least disturb you. These background tasks can take up system memory space that your programs had been using. On Windows XP–based PCs, this can slow progress to a crawl when you attempt to resume work.

SuperFetch monitors which applications you use the most and preloads these into your system memory so they'll be ready when you need them. Windows Vista also runs background programs, like disk defragmenting and Windows Defender, at low priority so that they can do their job but your work always comes first.
From: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/superfetch.aspx

Then there's this forum post: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/20050-post2.html which seems to suggest completely turning it off is bad.

So here's my take and understanding on it.

From the first item I linked to it notes this "These background tasks can take up system memory space that your programs had been using."

System memory? Not hard drive? I did a memory upgrade as I installed Win7RC at the same time I got my SSD. I have 8GB of ram, so worrying about conserving it, versus performance, performance is always coming first.

So what I understand is disabling SuperFetch can gain you some memory back, but it doesn't sound like it gains you performance or necessarily less writes to your hard drive either.

If I am understanding this incorrectly, however, please set me straight.

BTW I would be super careful in following other peoples guides, especially ones that are posted on forums from who knows who. I found this one: http://mydellmini.com/forum/windows-7/2441-windows-7-ultimate-ssd-speed-tweaks.html but it seems to have a lot of stuff wrong in it. A lot of these tweaks, while finding them from a Google search on SSD Windows 7 tweaks, seems to be specifically if you only have 1 drive and it's a SSD.

That guide talks about disabling index searching, disabling defrag, etc. The person isn't taking into account (if he was giving this guide for anybody with SSD) that disabling the services completely, keep them from functioning on regular hard drives as well. There are easy ways to use Windows 7 to disable defrag and indexing straight from the GUI on only your SSD drives.

Careful what you set, as you may soon find your regular hard drives functioning slower because you set a global setting for SSD, when your plattered hard drives are forced to use the same setting.

If anybody else finds useful guides for SSDs, please mention them. I hope this has helped somewhat.
 
Forgot to ask, Do you guys install all your programs to your SSD or a different drive i.e. Velociraptor in my case?
 
i got an corsair S128 SSD and works very well the numbers are nothing like whats below in the link posted but still 2-5x faster on access times (latency) on read and Writes)

the point off the ssd is for speed improvement, Put OS and programs and games onto the SSD, any files patches, big files or any files store them on an HDD (500GB or so HDD)

yes never buy an JMicron SSD thay are basicly poor mans drives and have crap write performance (and the 2x version was more of an stop cap that did not fix any thing)

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/954/6/

first one is JMicron SSD (ocz core/v2/apex, g.skill titan)
second one is the Corsair P256 (samsung second gen)
3rd one is the Vertex drive (the random write access times seem way to high)

Any SSD you buy that is samsung based controller (corsair or samsung SSD). be it first gen as well or any maker that uses Indilinx controller (falcon and vertex same drive) it will be an fully responsive pc no matter what type of SSD it is listed above (RAID is not needed with SSDs only thing you improve is data read/write speeds unless your messing with 10 gb files or video editing unlikey to need the speed)

easy way to pic out the bad SSDs from good if it has cache on it it will be good
If it has no cache on it it will suck depending if RAID 0 is not used or motherboard used (if RAID is used with Writeback option turnd on it hides the Writing problems on JMicron)
 
I put all program installs on my X25-M 160, any media, pictures etc is all on my **2TB WD RE4-GP. About the best combo you can do without going to the X25-E series which makes even me cringe.

** The $35~ higher price of the RE4-GP is so worth it. This thing is a beast and worth every penny, much like the X25 series.
 
Hmm, I installed an OCZ Vertex in my PC today and did a clean install of Win7 RC, but for some reason, it didn't automatically disable Defrag, Superfetch and Prefetch :(

I find it hard to believe that the Vertex doesn't meet the performance threshold.
 
I heard that it may not detect some SSDs.

Wonder if windows 7 has an option that allows you to tell it your disk is an SSD?

Does anyone know if windows 7 will detect intel SSDs?
 
Galvin said:
I thought windows 7 didn't need tweaks for SSD. Doesn't it automatically disable superfetch, indexing, defrag, etc?

Found the answer here, so there should be no need to tweak windows 7.
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx
Click to expand...

That's interesting, apparently Windows 7's default behavior incorporates some of the many tweaks people recommend for SSDs but not all, and according to that guide many of the things people often recommend are flat out wrong.

Look at what it says about the page file and hibernate file for instance, it seems to suggest a SSD should have no issue with either (and neither is disabled or placed on a 2dary drive by default under Windows 7, which personally I would've done intuitively, at 'least for the page file). The drive indexer isn't disabled by default for SSDs either, yet Superfetch is (which some people do recommend but I think that was born mostly out of the older slow-write SSDs w/JMicron controllers, etc).

Anyway, that doesn't seem to make any sense to me, isn't Superfetch just reading from the hard drive and writing to memory? How would it slow down your system or shorten the lifespan of the drive using it with an SSD? RAM's still a faster way of loading commonly used apps, why would they disable that?

I'm confused... :confused:

In fact, the only thing that FAQ seems to agree on w/everyone else is that defragging isn't necessary on SSDs (obviously). I'd imagine that whether the indexer runs on SSDs or not is a moot point, as most people will continue to keep data files on a 2dary HDD and that's what you really want indexed if you're using Windows' Search, but I dunno about Superfetch, hibernate, and the page file.
 
Impulse said:
Anyway, that doesn't seem to make any sense to me, isn't Superfetch just reading from the hard drive and writing to memory? How would it slow down your system or shorten the lifespan of the drive using it with an SSD? RAM's still a faster way of loading commonly used apps, why would they disable that?

I'm confused... :confused:

In fact, the only thing that FAQ seems to agree on w/everyone else is that defragging isn't necessary on SSDs (obviously). I'd imagine that whether the indexer runs on SSDs or not is a moot point, as most people will continue to keep data files on a 2dary HDD and that's what you really want indexed if you're using Windows' Search, but I dunno about Superfetch, hibernate, and the page file.
Click to expand...

You really don't need superfetch or index with the SSD, you conserve RAM and CPU ticks....
 
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