Performance Hardware User’s Guide How To Optimize your SSD Boot Drive A guide showing a few simple steps to optimize the performance of your SSD boot drive. Version 1.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive Introduction SSDs are the fastest drives available for desktop and portable computers. However, modern operating systems, programs, and games can quickly take up a huge amount of storage. One very popular set-up these days is for users to use an SSD for their boot drive and use standard hard drives for data storage space. Therefore, it’s wise to optimize the SSD space that you have when using an SSD as your boot drive.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive Disable Hibernation 1 If your system isn’t a laptop or netbook then you probably won’t ever need hibernation. While hibernation is turned on your system keeps a file on the root of your drive where it saves information about what you’re currently doing on your computer. Disabling hibernation is easily accomplished with a simple command line and will save you several GB’s of space.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive Change your Page File Settings 2a The primary purpose of your page file is to act as virtual memory. Windows 7 primarily uses it for a couple of things; first off it acts as a staging area for information the OS thinks it might need next (think cache) and as a backup in case you don’t have enough physical memory (DRAM). Additionally some applications are written to utilize the page file and may refuse to work correctly without one being present.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive 2b Change your Page File Settings The steps continued: 3. 4. 5. Select the “Advanced” tab and click on “Change” in the “Virtual Memory” section. Uncheck the box at the top and select your SSD. Click on “No paging file” then click on “Set”. Ignore any warnings, we’re simply relocating the pagefile. With so much system memory in today’s computers you might think that you could get away just turning off your page file.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive 2c Change your Page File Settings The steps continued: 6. 7. 8. Select your secondary drive and click on “System managed size”. Click on “Set” then “OK”. Reboot your computer and confirm that everything is where it should be. The pagefile.sys is a system file so you won’t be able to see it till you’ve changed your file view properties.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive 3a Turn off Indexing Indexing is a trick Windows uses to speed up the search for information on your hard drive. This helps on rotating media (HDD’s) but doesn’t provide any benefit on an SSD, and only increases CPU overhead. Indexing can be disabled in Windows Services.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive Turn off Indexing 3b Here are the steps we followed to turn it off: 1. 2. 3. Click on the “Start” button and type “services” into the search field then click on the “Services” program in the results field. Double-click on “Windows Search”. (tip: sort by name) Change “Startup type” to “Disabled” and click on “Stop” to turn off the service currently running.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive Modify Windows System Restore 4a While you could turn this function off entirely we feel that it’s worth keeping around. After all, as good as Windows 7 is, it still occasionally encounters problems, and being able to roll back your OS to an earlier version could save you the headache of having to reinstall everything from scratch.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive 4b Modify Windows System Restore The steps continued: 4. Under “Disk Space Usage” move the slider all the way to the left. According to Microsoft you’ll need to allow the system to reserve at least 300MB (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/How-much-diskspace-does-System-Restore-require). Fortunately, you control the percentage of reserved space with a slider bar, so it’s impossible to go below that barrier.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive 5 Game and Program Files and the Completed Installation While installing and running your games and programs on your SSD will be quickest, you’ll want to determine on a case by case basis which ones are important enough to reside on your SSD. Programs such as Outlook rely on a database file and really benefit from the increased IO of an SSD while most other programs aren’t going to see the same level of benefit and basically just take up space.
How to Optimize your SSD Boot Drive Resources Corsair SSD Product Page: http://www.corsair.com/products/ssd_home.aspx Corsair Blog, SSD section: http://blog.corsair.com/?cat=7 Corsair Support and Discussion Forums: http://forum.corsair.com/v3/index.php Microsoft Knowledge Base, System Restore: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/How-muchdisk-space-does-System-Restore-require © August, 2010, Corsair Memory, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
