Setting up SSD drive - Quick Question

[choliscott]

Hi Everyone, I had a quick question on the setting up an SSD with Windows 7. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything with the steps I taken & had a question about the users folder.

- Disable Drive indexing
- Turned off system protection
- Disable or set a small size for the paging file
- Disable Hybernation
- Disable Prefetch & Superfetch (in registry)
- Disable Windows Write Cache
- Disable Superfetch service
- Diable ClearPageFileAtShutdown & LargeSystemCache (in registry)
- Set system to "high performance" & disable drive power down

Am I missing anything that I should also do?

My other question has to do with the Users Folder. I used the following to move the public folder (I removed the : as it was adding emoticons to my text)

robocopy /mir C\users\public D\Users\Public
Then I went into safemode & did the following

rmdir /s /q C\Users\Public
mklink /j C\Users\Public D\Users\Public

This I know makes a junction, so while it looks like the files are on C, they are really on the D drive

For my user folder, I went into the property of each folder (Contacts, Documents, etc) & changed the location so it pointed to the D drive.

At the moment, the only folder I have still on the C drive is the AppData folder. Should this be moved to or would this be the only folder that should remain on the C drive?

If this should be moved, should I have used the same robocopy commands that I used (like when I moved the public folders) or is there another set of commands that I would need to use?

Thanks!!

 

[ViRGE]

Am I missing anything that I should also do?

Yes. Don't do that.

Windows 7 knows what a SSD is and how to handle it; you shouldn't be making any changes. In fact you've basically just shot yourself in the foot by having turned off search indexing and system protection. You really should go turn all of that back on (though if you don't intend to use Hibernation you can leave that off).

 

[MonkeyK]

Windows 7 is supposed to know what an SSD is, but I have found that it does not do a number of things that it is supposed to for SSDs.

1) Defragmentaion should not be scheduled on a device with an SSD (a general search will show this, but for a reputable source, I point to:
http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029623.htm#5
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Remaining points can be found here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911.html

2) Disk indexing should probably be disabled. The argument here is that indexing does not provide the same benefit that it does for mechanical drives.

3) Prefetch and Superfetch should be disabled. For a more authoritative source see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx Which notes that Win7 is supposed to default these values to disabled.

4) Power Settings for the SSD HD should be changed to never turn off (at least while plugged in). This ensures that the SSD can do garbage collection while the user is away from the device.

 

[choliscott]

By Indexing, I went to the properties of the SSD & unchecked "Allow files on this drive to have files indexed"

Is this the one you are thinking of? If so, I'm trying to figure out why I would want to index the files on the SSD especially if they are only supposed to be program/application files

Yes. Don't do that.

Windows 7 knows what a SSD is and how to handle it; you shouldn't be making any changes. In fact you've basically just shot yourself in the foot by having turned off search indexing and system protection. You really should go turn all of that back on (though if you don't intend to use Hibernation you can leave that off).

 

[ViRGE]

By Indexing, I went to the properties of the SSD & unchecked "Allow files on this drive to have files indexed"

Is this the one you are thinking of? If so, I'm trying to figure out why I would want to index the files on the SSD especially if they are only supposed to be program/application files

Because searching an index is still faster than searching raw files. There's absolutely no downside to leaving this on.

 

[SimMike2]

I think you are totally overthinking the situation. Windows 7 should know what to do. Let it do its thing. The only thing I did after the fact was get rid of hibernation, but even this I waited months until my SSD was getting too full.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

The storage forum has a sticky about SSDs. You should go read it if you haven't. More than half the stuff you did to "optimize" your SSD was either unnecessary or actually detrimental to performance.

 

[choliscott]

I did actually take look it. However I also looked at some of the stickies on other websites like this one & practically all say to do something different in terms of what settings to change

The storage forum has a sticky about SSDs. You should go read it if you haven't. More than half the stuff you did to "optimize" your SSD was either unnecessary or actually detrimental to performance.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Yes, the misinformation on how to set up an SSD is like weeds popping up all over the place in different forms.

The only things you should really worry about doing are disabling hibernation if you don't use it, mucking with your page file as long as you know what you're doing, and turning off System Restore if you really don't care to ever use it -- but all of this applies only if you have a small SSD and *really* need the space.

The rest of the stuff is completely unneeded and/or lowers performance. Just run the WEI tool from inside Windows and it'll treat your SSD how it is supposed to.