SSD Tips and Tweaks

Come, share your tips!

By RedneckDude on April 25, 2012 12:51:37 AM from

WinCustomize Forums

Guys, I know a few of us have SSDs. I'm pretty sure more do than we know.

What say we all share any tips or tweaks we might have so we can all benefit from each other's knowledge.

Or maybe we can ask a question, someone else may have the answer.

I'll start by saying I have an OCZ Vertex Plus 120 GB. Sata II on a Sata II Mobo.

Currently, I get the following stats when testing. I wonder how this compares with yours and if it can be tweaked.

+1103 Karma | 105 Replies

I moved the temp files to a platter drive, page file as well.

Ah, come on, you really don't need to do that and it kind of defeats the purpose of having an SSD.

My temp files and page file are all on my SSD RAID. Each of the three drives in the RAID array has over 19,400 power on hours (that's more than 2 years), had almost 5 TB written to it and still shows only 97% in the SMART media wearout indicator attribute (100% is a brand new drive).

This is why I made this thread.

Jorge, I'm not in raid and only have 120 GB ssd.

quoting post

Guys, I know a few of us have SSDs. I'm pretty sure more do than we know.

Currently, I get the following stats when testing. I wonder how this compares with yours and if it can be tweaked.

Reduced 94%Original 520 x 466

I dont have a Super Star Destroyer, why didnt someone tell me they were being sold?

Quoting RedneckDude,

reply 53

Jorge, I'm not in raid and only have 120 GB ssd.

Same thing. With normal usage your SSD will last about 5 years. When was the last time you kept the same hard disk for 5 years?

Defrag is a no-no for SSDs because it moves a *lot* of data around with *zero* benefits on SSDs. Other than that, just use your SSD as you would any other disk drive, and enjoy the speed benefits.

So let the page file, and temp files take up space on a small SSD?

Hibernation too, I guess....

well its not about the usage of the ssd JcRabbit its just to avoid filling the drive with junk that is not needed-( im not doing it for the warranty or for the lifetime that i suspend/freeze ) it´s up to you if you want to have it there but i use the www and travel a lot of different pages a day last time i checked my temp drive and my ContentIE folder had about 6 gigs of JUNK in it...that is just a suggestion not a must do trick- of course you should use your ssd but keeping it clean is part of having a working Cputer

Yes, temp files and the page file do take up disk space - however, they are also the files that benefit the most from living in an SSD.

Think about it: when is the page file used? All the time! When an application is minimized, after a while part of that application's memory space is paged out to disk, even on systems with lots of memory. When you return to the application, that data that was written to the page file must be paged into memory again.

Ever run a game and then ALT-TABBed back to Windows on a system with limited RAM? If you have, you will know exactly what I am talking about, the system 'stutters' and the desktop slowly redraws while things are being moved into and out of the page file. This is because hard disks are *slow*, and this is where SSDs *really* shine!

As for temp files, these obviously benefit from being written to an SSD too. Provided you regularly 'clean up the house' using Disk Cleanup - as you should with hard disks too - you'll benefit more from leaving them on the SSD than otherwise.

Unless your PC is a web server with a database that is hammered by many thousands of users every day (that could indeed kill a consumer grade SSD in a short time), my advice is to treat the SSD just like you would a normal hard drive - just don't do things to it that were conceived with hard disks in mind and that have zero benefits for SSDs (Defrag, file position optimizations, etc...).

and an SSD will start to noticeably lose its speed once it becomes more than half full so why put temp files and such on it? that's not my opinion, that came from Corsair and OCZ.

Quoting MadDeez,

reply 60

and an SSD will start to noticeably lose its speed once it becomes more than half full so why put temp files and such on it? that's not my opinion, that came from Corsair and OCZ.

In that case, why put any files on it? According to that theory, nothing is faster than a totally empty SSD.

TRIM and garbage collection ensure that what you mention no longer happens or is largely irrelevant. Corsair and OCZ might have said that, but do you know *why* that could be so? I'll be happy to explain if not.

A hard disk also gets slower as it becomes more full, although for totally different reasons: in the case of the hard disk, it's because the outer sectors in the disk platters provide better performance than the inner sectors.

JcRabbit, you have my respect. But if you want to put temp files, your page file, hibernation files, and other unnecessary files on your SSD RAID array, more power to you. If the people at Corsair recommend not putting those files on my SSD, I'm going to take their advice to heart. To each their own, as the saying goes.

Quoting JcRabbit,

reply 59

Think about it: when is the page file used? All the time!

Is a page file used all the time when you have 8 GB of ram?

Quoting RedneckDude,

reply 63

Is a page file used all the time when you have 8 GB of ram?

Virtual memory is. You have no control when a page is committed to disk, that's up to the OS. IIRC, older 'stale' pages are normally committed to disk after a while, regardless of how much RAM you have.

Quoting MadDeez,

reply 62

If the people at Corsair recommend not putting those files on my SSD, I'm going to take their advice to heart. To each their own, as the saying goes.

As you said, to each their own: I know some people will short-stroke their hard disks to get absolute maximum performance in exchange of huge amounts of wasted hard disk space, and I personally would never do that as it does not suit *my* needs.

What I am giving you, however, are facts: each drive in my SSD array has over 19,000 power on hours. Forgetting for a moment it is a three drive RAID 0 array, let's pretend it's a single 240 GB SSD. In that case, in over 2 years of 24/24 usage, *with* the page file and temp files in the SSD, the drive had 15 TB written to it (5 TB per drive * 3 drives). Since the Media Wearout indicator is a function of the number of bytes written vs. total space available on the drive, for a single 240 GB SSD this indicator would remain at 97% (same as the number in each of the drives).

Now do the math. How long do you think this drive will last at the current usage levels?

What I am trying to point out is that some things are just not worth doing, if done for the wrong reasons. If you are transferring your page file to a hard drive because you are under the assumption that writes to the page file will prematurely kill your SSD, then you are wrong. If, however, you are doing this to maximize free space on your SSD, then you might have a point - but personally I would prefer to enjoy the speed boost that having the page file in the SSD gives me.

Please understand that having the page file on the SSD *does* decrease its life-span for the simple reason that flash cells have a limited number of write cycles - I am NOT saying it doesn't. However, all SSDs use wear leveling techniques to minimize this problem, based on the free number of cells in the drive *and* the spare area every SSD has. This is one of the reasons why filling an SSD to full capacity is probably *a very bad thing* (you limit the number of empty cells that can be used for wear leveling).

There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when predicting how long an SSD will last - workload, total capacity, size of spare area, etc... - but, for an Intel SSD 520 240 GB drive, Anandtech calculated the maximum number of TB written to it before every cell is exhausted to be around 1010 TB (for an Intel 320 drive with 160 GB, this number is 803 TB).

So, since in 2 years I have written 15 TB to my '240 GB' SSD, at the current usage level and according to the above numbers, my RAID 0 array might just last another 100 years.

The point is, *even* if the lifespan was just 5 years, in 5 years I will have already replaced my SSDs with something else which is faster and cheaper. So there is no point in over-optimizing, the trade off is simple not worth it.

wow long text and yes i do agree JcRabbit while i have a fast connection i prefer the pagefiles on an other hdd not because i care about how long my ssd lives... just to avoid stuffing it i use it for my main programs Zbrush Photoshop and others messengers and so on while i picked a messenger that has an option to store the messages also on a other drive this way i dont have to clean up iam lazy thats the main point of having not to clean it and having it run at almost full speed without doing anything unless cleaning the registry now and then...But like you said if you have an ssd use it its not cheap so it has to do something not only provide a fast boot up and the lifespan opf those things is huge unless you fill it with data and move the data on a daily basis but for that you must have to work with HD movies or use it as server drive... or save Zbrush models with over 10k polygons each day just to burn them on a dvd that would reduce the lifespan...
Just wanted to provide that tipp since there might be more lazy people like me

Ok, I switched the page file and temps back to the SSD, not noticing any real difference in speed.

Quoting RedneckDude,

reply 63

Is a page file used all the time when you have 8 GB of ram?

Yes.

And I have 12 ...

Here's my tip: Buy a big enough SSD to suit your needs so that it can be actually used to it's full potential. Bottlenecking it with a platter drive or sweating over filling it up makes no sense at all to me

.Who puts a 60, 90 or 120 GB drive in anything any more? A 256 GB SSD would be my minimum capacity. I've waited this long, I can wait until I can afford a properly sized SSD.

my 3.00275 cents worth, (adjusted for inflation.)