routine maintenance for SSD

[nice_shoes]

I've been using my SSD, Crucial C300 64GB, for many months and it works fine. However, I looked at the drive "properties" popup window and have a couple questions:

 

• there is a checkbox on the properties popup window that says "Compress this drive to save disk space"................should I do this?
• I think that a defragmentation is not recommended for an SSD, but there is a button on the properties popup window that says "Disk Cleanup".............should I do this?
• OR, does the TRIM feature eliminate the need for doing these things?

[Shurman292]

I would never compress a drive to save space. That would significantly reduce your performance as your cpu has to unzip everything before it can be read. If you need more space, you need to buy another HDD or SSD.

 

Also, you are correct in thinking that you should never defragemnt an SSD. However, you can perform the disk cleanup, but I and many others on OCC recommend using CCleaner instead of disk cleanup. It does a much more thorough job, and it also includes a registry cleaner that helps keep your system speedy.

 

It is my understanding that the TRIM feature only works to reduce "wear" on the drive by spreading out the writes to previously un-written sectors of the drive. This method helps extend the "like new" performance of the SSD.

[Waco]

Disk cleanup is fine to use, but I'd never use the online compression or defragmentation.

[PremiumAcc]

Depending on your hardware, NTFS compression could negatively impact performance. However, if you have at least a dual core processor, you should not notice the additional load as a result of having compression enabled. Furthermore, with NTFS compression enabled you will be able to free up much needed space--if you have a small SSD--on your SSD. Thus, you could consider enabling NTFS compression. But, you should take note that the amount of space free up on your SSD depends on the type of data you are compressing. Also, you should be aware that with NTFS compression enabled you will be consuming more a SSD's write cycles, which could have negative effects on the SSD's life span.

 

Defrag should never be performed on an SSD as it will reduce the SSD's life span without giving you any real benefit.

 

Disk cleanup is safe to use and should be used as it is a good means of invoking TRIM.

 

TRIM does not delete files, it merely sends a message to the SSD, informing the drive that the blocks that were once used by those files are now available for the SSD to use in garbage collection.

[Waco]

NTFS compression will absolutely MURDER performance on a boot drive, even if it is an SSD (in fact it will be even more noticeable on an SSD). It will eat up a TON of write cycles as well since any time new data is written to disk it will both amplify the write in the OS (because of compression) and on the disk (because of the Flash Translation Layer).

[ir_cow]

Don't use compress disk space because most (If not all but the recent ones ) go super slow . I did a test and went from 150write to 45mb/s with compression on. Seems like my drive took a huge hit. Some do, some don't

[PremiumAcc]

NTFS compression will absolutely MURDER performance on a boot drive, even if it is an SSD (in fact it will be even more noticeable on an SSD). It will eat up a TON of write cycles as well since any time new data is written to disk it will both amplify the write in the OS (because of compression) and on the disk (because of the Flash Translation Layer).

 

I would beg to differ; there should be no noticeable change in your performance as a boot drive, as a friend of mine has it enabled on his SSD for testing purposes a while back and he has not reported of any slowdowns in performance. However, (depending on the applications you use) you may or may not experience increased wait times for programs to launch. Despite our disagreement of NTFS compression effects on SSD performance, I do agree with Waco that having the compression enabled will "eat up a TON of write cycles," which in turn will reduce your SSD's endurance.

 

Edit: Hornybluecow, that is quite a big hit you took. My friend had a Samsung 830 and he only suffered a minor decrease in sequential write speeds.

Edited June 6, 2012 by PremiumAcc

[ir_cow]

yeah i'm using the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos using the SF-2281 controller. same as the vertex 3 series

[nice_shoes]

OK, thanks to everyone..............I played it safe and downloaded CCleaner instead of using the Windows Disk Cleanup button...........again thanks for all the helpful replies.

[ir_cow]

ahhh don't use CCleaner! It might just my bad luck but last time i used it, windows no longer booted. it wiped some the wrong registry files. I haven't used it since. To be clear this was on Vista 64bit but i'll never use it again because i like that my windows still boots. I haven't come across anyone else with this issue but some of my friends had problems no long work because it deleted the cdkeys.

 

 

another good thing to do is turn off hibernation go to CMD.exe and type

powercfg -h off 

and it should free up about 15gb.

Edited June 6, 2012 by hornybluecow

[Waco]

I would beg to differ; there should be no noticeable change in your performance as a boot drive, as a friend of mine has it enabled on his SSD for testing purposes a while back and he has not reported of any slowdowns in performance. However, (depending on the applications you use) you may or may not experience increased wait times for programs to launch. Despite our disagreement of NTFS compression effects on SSD performance, I do agree with Waco that having the compression enabled will "eat up a TON of write cycles," which in turn will reduce your SSD's endurance.

 

Edit: Hornybluecow, that is quite a big hit you took. My friend had a Samsung 830 and he only suffered a minor decrease in sequential write speeds.

The sequential speeds generally aren't the issue. Random write speeds get absolutely killed with compression enabled (nearly as slow as a traditional hard drive).

[Shurman292]

ahhh don't use CCleaner! It might just my bad luck but last time i used it, windows no longer booted. it wiped some the wrong registry files. I haven't used it since. To be clear this was on Vista 64bit but i'll never use it again because i like that my windows still boots. I haven't come across anyone else with this issue but some of my friends had problems no long work because it deleted the cdkeys.

 

 

another good thing to do is turn off hibernation go to CMD.exe and type

powercfg -h off 

and it should free up about 15gb.

I've used CCleaner on at least 7 different computers and they are all fine. Have been working perfectly ever since. If you're weary of it just don't use the registry cleaner. I've used it on my personal rig at least once weekly with no adverse effects.

 

I do agree with hornybluecow about hibernation though, it takes up a ton of space. Also, if you have lots of RAM you may consider reducing the size of your pagefile to around 1gb or so.