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SSD tweaks for Win7?


zackhaf

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So I have recommended a friend on what components to buy for a new computer. The storage will be OS on a crucial m4 128GB, with a 1TB HDD for all other data (pics, movies...)

 

My question is : What kind of tweaks or settings do I have to do within Win 7 to make sure everything runs properly?

 

I know that I can just put the OS on the SSD and use the other for just files, but I have also heard a few things that the SSD does not "like", such as temp files and things of that nature. Any help is greatly appreciated!

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So I have recommended a friend on what components to buy for a new computer. The storage will be OS on a crucial m4 128GB, with a 1TB HDD for all other data (pics, movies...)

 

My question is : What kind of tweaks or settings do I have to do within Win 7 to make sure everything runs properly?

 

I know that I can just put the OS on the SSD and use the other for just files, but I have also heard a few things that the SSD does not "like", such as temp files and things of that nature. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

NONE... Windows 7 does the tweaks it needs to the SSD automatically. Just let it run and you will be fine.

Edited by ComputerEd

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I kind of agree with Computer Ed on the tweaks. Heres Why. I did my build which has some of the parts you are looking at. I then used a Win 7 tweak recommendations from the OCZ website. I ended up having so many problems that i had to reinstall my OS. I just left it alone and Ive had the most beautiful computer experience ive had I think ever. Win 7 is truly an improvement on WinXP imo. I have tweaked the cpu and have some good mushkin ram and a slight Overclock on the GPU.

Totally satisfied with the parts and performance with no Win 7 tweaks. If anything I would recoomend you just start from this point and see if it really is worth it.

 

Edit: Sorry I missed the part on the temp files. Yeah, I use Ccleaner often and clean out the temp files. Especially when DL'ing games. Not much to that really just use a good cleaner and keep things right.

Edited by Kwok

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I moved my indexing file, download file and temp file to my D: drive RAID array. Other than that the only things I've done is disable power saving features in my BIOS and set the Windows 7 power plan to "high performance". If you want to run the "balanced" plan I'd recommend that you change the "turn off hard drive" setting to "never". Other than that you're good to go.

 

The only other thing worth mentioning deals with whether you're going to run the SSD off an Intel controller and using RST drivers 10.0 or later. If so you might consider disabling LPM through a registry tweak (applies mainly to P67 and Z68 chipsets) but did show a slight improvement on my X58 ICH10R controller. This isn't completely necessary though as performance gains are minimal and probably not worth the hassle except for benchmark runs.

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NONE... Windows 7 does the tweaks it needs to the SSD automatically. Just let it run and you will be fine.

 

That is not true.

 

First you are going to need to configure the drive in the BIOS to AHCI BEFORE installing windows 7. It seems like the Crucial M4 has TRIM. It doesn't say on Newegg.com if it does or not, but a whole bunch of people seem to have trim enabled on their PC. Lets pretend that the Crucial M4 has TRIM. You will need to enable that yourself by going to the command prompt and running it as administrator and typing in ( fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 ) .

 

Next (especially if you are on a desktop) you should disable hibernation. This takes up a lot of space on the SSD and is never needed because it is a desktop and you either have the darn thing on or off. You again go to command prompt under administrator and type in ( powercfg -h off ) . It will free up quite a bit of space.

 

Then you can do things like enable write caching and disable Super fetch and prefetch. However, these are more optional. The first two are what I would consider to be important. Not to mention that windows 7 does not do it itself.

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NONE... Windows 7 does the tweaks it needs to the SSD automatically. Just let it run and you will be fine.

 

 

wrong. my SSD double the performance when i did some tweaks.

 

- move page file to another drive and turn it off for the SSD

- turn off restore point (saves disk space)

- turn off auto defrag (pointless and can ruin a ssd)

- move firefox temp memory to another drive (kinda like page files)

- turn off superfech (completely pointless on a ssd and awill save the drive in the long run)

 

there was a few others i can't remember off the top of my head but also make sure the drive has the newest FW before you install anything. sometimes drives will either delete everything or refuse to update the FW when data is on it.

 

For ACHI i don't think they will even show up in IDE mode. not sure... but it will be severely limited in speed and legacy issues when left in IDE mode

Edited by hornybluecow

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Everyone please remember that Windows 7 will make many adjustments for you during the installation because in most instances (as long as the SSD is performing up to snuff) W7 is SSD aware. On the four SSDs I've installed on W7 machines now it has Always automatically; disabled defragmentation, put superfetch and Windows Search to manual instead of Auto start.

 

Recommendations to put page file on another drive > hotly debated but I agree and move mine to a separate RAID0 array

To turn off System Restore > completely agree

Defrag will be turned off automatically and you'll have to re-enable it for any mechanical hard drives in the system should you choose to use it (in fact the SSD won't even show as a drive available for defragmentation in the scheduler)

Move browser temp files to another drive > completely agree

Turn off superfetch > hotly debated. I've done it both ways and personally I like superfetch

Windows search / indexing > hotly debated but I keep it enabled (especially if the system has traditional hard drive(s) in addition to the SSD

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I do the following when installing W7 onto an SSD:

 

1. Move the page file to another drive. This is for space reasons more than anything else.

2. Move the temporary file location to another drive. This usually speeds up copying and saves space.

3. Move the Windows log files to another drive. This avoids unnecessary writes to the SSD.

4. Enable Superfetch if it was disabled.

5. Enable Search Indexing if it was disabled.

 

 

That's it. W7 will by default turn off defragmentation on all SSDs. You won't see any real performance increase from anything above (except for MAYBE 4 and 5) and anyone who says differently likely is suffering from the placebo effect. :P

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I've tried nearly all of the SSD Tweaks ...a lot from the OCZ Guide that Kwok mentions and all were useless. Only tweaks I've kept is turning off hibernation so I could get rid of the hiberfil.sys file and I'm using SymLinks to a storage drive on a program or two that constantly write to files when I'm running those apps.

 

For most people, I would say turning off hibernation is really the only tweak someone truly needs as that is the only one Win7 didn't automate for. Fetch/Superfetch/Indexing/No Indexing had no performance gain what so ever and in some cases hurt my performance so I had to revert back to Win7 defaults.

 

 

There is no need to make it any more complex than it needs to be. Just like Wevsspot said, Win7 pretty much takes care of everything you truly need.

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My main concern is setting it up right the first time. Since it is not my rig, I wont have access to it all the time, and Im not sure how much of this will be done by my friend once i pass it along. I know he would much prefer it to "just work" and not have to worry about any complicated settings.

 

From what I gather, installing Win 7 will take care of most of that, and then disable the hibernation feature. Do i need to mess with the sleep settings, or is hibernation the only thing?

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If energy savings and the ability to sleep (and more importantly come out of sleep correctly) are important - then just leave everything as Windows 7 sets it up and be done with it. If squeezing the most performance out of the SSD is important, then change the hard drive sleep settings in the power plan to "never", and if you're going to do that you might as well save some valuable SSD real estate and get rid of the hiber. file too.

 

Sounds to me like here the best solution for you is;

 

Leave everything as Windows 7 sets it up except be sure to re-enable Superfetch and Search Indexing (assuming that W7 shut those down as a result of detecting a SSD during the installation)

 

To save SSD drive space set a custom page file size. By default the standard page file size will be up to 1.5 times the size of the amount of memory installed in the computer. Windows support has an entire volume dedicated to determining the "correct" page file size, but for all intents and purposes if you're running 4Gb or more of memory you can set the page file to 1024-2048Mb and forget it.

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Thanks for the help. I got it all set up and running just fine. The set up is meant for engineering applications, but Im pretty sure its overkill for most things. Its got a 2600k, MSI 560Ti, and ASRock Fata1ty board

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