Optimizing Solid State Drive or SSD

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Nowadays, the bigger and slower magnetic hard drives are getting replaced by the SSD or Solid State Drives. The SSD though, comes with a heavy price tag, it is still capturing the personal computer market as competition among different brands made it possible to have higher storage capacity at a low price.

Let us have a look of a few of the optimization tricks regarding SSD that will come handy if you recently bought a PC with SSD or want to replace your old magnetic hard drive with a SSD.

No need of defragmentation

Unlike magnetic drives, where defragmentation of drives is essential for proper maintenance of your hard drive, (as this lowers the time requires to access a file) SSDs do not need to be defragmented. The functionality of SSDs is different, so its treatment. In fact defragmentation often reduces the life span of a SSD by creating too many write operations. Windows is configured in a way that the auto defragment option for SSDs is already disabled. But, it is always better to be doubly sure.

Disable System Restore

There are strong debates on whether to disable or enable system restore in SSDs. But, most reports show that enabling system restores often slows down the performance of SSDs considerably. It also can create interference with “TRIM” a very essential operation of SSD.

So it is advisable to disable the System Restore option, though this means that you will not be able to recover from situations such as a bad device driver or installation errors, etc. You can always use a back up option by any third party without any risk. Disabling the system restore also increases the longevity of your SSD and additionally some disk space is freed.

Disable Drive indexing

The basic purpose of indexing is to have fast access to the searched information. Though indexing can significantly improve upon the performance of magnetic storage drives, it has very little impact on SSDs. SSDs are already providing you enough low access time and enabling driving indexing will create a lot of write operations, thus reducing the overall lifespan of your SSD (similar to system restore and defragmentation).

Drive indexing therefore is a useless function for SSDs. But, it has no risk involved as with the system restore. To disable drive indexing just right click on the SSD and go to the properties. Then deselect the box mentioning “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed.” Disregard the error message.

Disable both Prefetch and SuperFetch

The files and programs which are in frequent use are usually kept as cache by the Windows using the features Prefetch and SuperFetch for quicker access. These features again are good for your magnetic drive, but call for increase in write operations, thus minimizing the lifespan of your SSD. These features can be easily disabled by using the Registry Editor of Windows. It is advisable to use caution while operating Registry Editor to evade complications and errors. A system restart is required for the changes to take effect.

Disable the Hibernation feature

The hibernation feature allows you to restore your previous session from where you left at. So this will reduce the boot time considerably and you can start your work quicker. This is done by saving the contents in RAM into a system file known as Hiberfil.sys that is equal in size to the physical RAM on the system. But, these benefits are not necessary with SSDs as they are fast enough to negate the delay associated with magnetic drives. The space occupied by the hibernation file can be used for other purposes.

Simply disable hibernation by giving the command prompt “powercfg -h off.”

Place the Pagefile to another drive

If you have an additional magnetic hard drive you can store your Pagefile in it instead of keeping it in SSD. The use of Pagefile usually produces numerous write operations that will surely affect the longevity of your SSD. Increased write operations mean increased wear and tear of your SSD.
To achieve this you just have to install your magnetic drive and move the Pagefile in it. Then go to control panel and click system, advance system settings, advanced performance, settings, advanced, virtual memory and finally change. Here you can set your Pagefile location.