The SSD Review SSD Optimization Guide

[The SSD Guy]

Wow thank you very much and welcome to the site! The great thing is any help you need at all we are here. In turn, I am sure you can inspire some new threads with thoughts, ideas and experience of your own to help us out!

[phenicx]

Thank you very much. I easily saved 8GB + 3 sec boot time!!!

Very useful thread.

[nsiti]

Thanks for this guide, it seems well thought out and comprehensive.
There are however, several steps with no reasoning behind the recommendations.
Could you explain why you recommend the following (and whether the recommendations are drive dependent):
a) disabling prefetch and superfetch
b) disabling windows search and superfetch
c) disabling clearpagefileatshutdown and largesystemcache
d) NTFS memory usage & NTFS disable name creation

Many thanks.

[Badelhas]

Thanks for this guide, it seems well thought out and comprehensive.
There are however, several steps with no reasoning behind the recommendations.
Could you explain why you recommend the following (and whether the recommendations are drive dependent):
a) disabling prefetch and superfetch
b) disabling windows search and superfetch
c) disabling clearpagefileatshutdown and largesystemcache
d) NTFS memory usage & NTFS disable name creation

Many thanks.

Exactly, I would like to know this also. Disable without a reason dosent seem a good policy. Props for the guide, very well made!

Cheers,
Andre

[The SSD Guy]

If the process serves no purpose, it only adds to the number of things that can go wrong at the end of the day. It is like a fifth wheel on a car or a third leg. Disabling fetch and superfetch as well as a few others are optimizations that are recommended by some of the best companies and peer guides. You will see no difference whatsoever and no benefit is gained from leaving it on.

Let me give you an example with pagefile. It was originally created too make up for the lack of memory in a system because of price however, today, there is plenty of memory for the typical user. I have shut down pagefile for years without a single instance of problem and I am very much a power user. The ONLY purpose of pagefile today is to allow a dump file if your system crashes that can be examined. The problem of course is Win 7 does not crash and that file could not be read by the typical consumer. It does nothing to help the situation in any case whereas shutting it down gies you back 4GB of valuable space.

the same can be said of hibernate where shutting it down gives you another 4GB of space yet leaving it on with an SSD is truly pointless as we are already seeing start times of under 20 seconds on most SSD systems.

At the end of the day, this Guide has become the hottest of its kind on the internet by a long shot and yes, it may be time for a face lift in explaining, or even removing, some of the les important optimizations. Thanks for the input and support!

[Joe R]

Being new to the SSD world can you tell me whether the listed items on this guide are specifically for a system with one SSD that holds the main OS. Would these tweaks affect my system that has 1 SSd with OS and respective programs and an HDD holding data? Thank you in advance for clarifying.

[stratosrally]

I used this guide to set up my system with Windows and most applications on the SSD, and 2 more mechanical hard drives that I use for storage and some games.

Been going on for pretty close to a year and very happy with its performance.

Hope that answers your question, and welcome to The SSD Review!

Be sure to post any more questions you might have...

[Sean]

Welcome aboard Joe R

As long as all your applications are installed on SSD, I don't see any issue with carrying out all the steps in the guide with one or more HDDs also installed.

However, if you have certain applications installed on HDD that you regularly use, then I would suggest skipping step 9 and leaving the SuperFetch service enabled in step 10. Windows uses Prefetch and SuperFetch to cache frequently accessed files, which would still help the performance of the applications installed on the separate HDD.

[Daniel Bliss]

Are any of these steps contingent on any other steps?

For instance, should one only apply step 17 (disable clearpagefileshutdown) if one has applied step 6 (turn off pagefile)?

Thanks.

[The SSD Guy]

There is no need to follow or not follow any steps and none are contingent on any other being done prior.