Solid State Drive Usage Tips

[mta]

In my recent discovery that Windows 8 doesn't turn off the Windows Disk Defragmenter (now called Optimise Drives) any more, I was double-checking other Windows settings to check their status and decided it was time to gather all the details into one document.

 

Attached are my thoughts in an attempt to get all the SSD usage theories in one place and maybe inform others.

 

Feel free to highlight any short-comings, or add further improvements.

[Alan_B]

Warning.

 

I moved the Pagefile and got bit in the butt.

 

Windows got confused over the SATA interfaces and knocked "offline" the Samsung HDD which was holding my relocated 8 GB pagefile,

and as a result Windows decided to create a new Pagefile and it gobbled up an 8 GB slice of my SSD.

I reduced that to 16 MegaByte and Windows reluctantly rebooted with that.

15 MB was too small on my 64 bit system - but probably 8 MB would be acceptable on a 32 bit system.

 

I have now restored an 8 GB pagefile on the Samsung HDD,

and am keeping 16 MB pagefile on the OCZ SSD to prevent losing another 8 GB chunk the next time Windows kills Samsung.

 

I would like to think that Windows will NOT write to the 16 MB Pagefile until the 8 GB Pagefile is either full or missing due to another Windows Whoopsie,

 

I don't trust Windows, and Windows don't like me.

[mta]

that's a bugger @Alan_B, I've never had an issue moving the PF off the primary drive, even before the SSD, having 2 HDD's, I used to move the PF over to the non-

OS drive and was never bitten in the butt.

 

in my opinion, and this is only theory, if Windows sees multiple PF's across multiple HD's, it will probably try a do something similar to RAID data striping.

if that's correct, all your PF's are going to be accessed.

[Alan_B]

The PF relocation had no part in the cause of the disaster.

 

The temporary loss of 30% of my free space,

and the permanent loss of 1 Program Erase Cycle to 14% of the Flash cells in my SSD,

was nothing but an irritation.

 

Now that I have one of my two HDD back in service and that again holds an 8 GB Pagefile.sys,

I am retaining the tiny 16 MB PF to forestall future irritations.

 

The fundamental cause of disaster is Microsoft incompetence in the numbering of Discs connected via SATA,

and as a result Windows "fixed" the complex GUID of my GPT by changing it to a simple hexadecimal number that exactly matched the Disc ID of my main MBR HDD,

and then decided that two off discs with the same ID was not allowed so it knocked off-line my MBR HDD,

after which the only accessible HDD was the original GPT HDD which was now filled with RAW data because Windows cannot read a GPT/MBR hybrid.

 

I had no problem regaining access to the original MBR HDD and all its contents are intact.

That only took a few minutes.

After 3 months I am still evaluating Data Recovery software that can handle Raw Data on a GPT disc that has lost its partitions.

 

The primary lesson I have learnt is NEVER have a mix of MBR and GPT discs - Windows will trash them without limit.

[nodles]

I've moved my pagefile back to SSD, but I've reduced its size to 512MB. IMO setting (fixed) pagefile on SSD is better choice (faster).

Here's similar chat/guide (SSD with Win7, could/should be updated a bit though): http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=34924

What I've done is;

- Checked that TRIM is on & supported

- Reduced size of fixed pagefile (moved it back to SSD)

- Disabled defrag, hibernate, system restore, indexing+search, Superfetch/Prefetch

- Keeping SSD firmware up-to-date

- Keeping AHCI drivers (Intel RST) up-to-date

[Guest Keatah]

One thing I want to add is always try to maintain 20-25% free space. Don't pack it full.

 

This allows internal behind-the-scenes activities like TRIM, Garbage Collection, Free Space Consolidation, Wear Leveling, all that good stuff - to happen with much better efficiency. Consider it an incentive to use CCleaner more often!

 

I'm not in favor of disabling Last Access Timestamps. Perhaps I'm biased because a lot of my activities (now) involve syncing and archiving classic computing material. Turning it off kills my differential comparison and de-duplication software. I wonder how it would affect online updates and mobile device syncing?

 

I will agree with all other posted recommendations and comments.

[Alan_B]

One thing I want to add is always try to maintain 20-25% free space. Don't pack it full.

I have learnt the hard way that some free space is better spent as UNALLOCATED SPACE following the last partition on the SSD.

 

I understand that Unallocated Space is just as good as free space within the partition(s) so far as "TRIM ... all that good stuff".

 

I regret a default Windows 7 installation that allocated all the space available on my SSD because :-

I use Macrium Reflect partition image backup and when things go wrong it only takes a few minutes to restore the previous normality,

and after restoring I can NORMALLY continue to use SMALL Incremental and Differential backups based on the same original LARGE Full image backup.

BUT

the last time I did such a restore I first of all followed recommendations to securely erase the entire SSD to give it a clean start,

after which everything worked perfectly UNTIL I made the next small Differential Backup - and that failed and then created a new LARGE Full image backup,

which consumes more space on my archives.

The reason it failed was that when I ran the OCZ software to erase their SSD, there was also a firmware update,

and my 60 GB SSD shrunk by a couple of MB, so when Macrium restored my backup it had to fit a 2 MB smaller partition,

and when I wanted a Differential backup Macrium needed to access a FULL image that was the same size as what I had been reduced to.

 

It is the SSD firmware that determines the percentage of the Flash Cells that excluded from space available partitions,

and I guess the latest firmware excluded a little bit more - though OCZ deny that it was the fault of their firmware.

[mta]

Thanks @Keatah, I'll add your first point to v2 of the document.

 

As to Date Last Accessed, I believe in my researching, that it is already off by default (Win8 and 7 too I think) if a SSD is detected.

[Alan_B]

When you Securely Erase your SSD you should shut down your computer and take a coffee break before you power up and start writing to the SSD.

 

OCZ recommend a full shut-down before power-up.

When I complained about a shrinking partition after a secure erase,

experienced users on the OCZ User forum advised

a few seconds waiting whilst shut-down to allow the SSD firmware to initiate whatever needs initiating before power up.

I now fear that if I do not wait long enough a worse fate than shrinking partitions may befall me.

Rather than waiting a few seconds I am taking a coffee break

 

Different versions of SSD and different manufacturers may have different requirements.

[Winapp2.ini]

I try to maintain about 40% (± 10%) free space on my SSD. I don't run a pagefile at all (12GB ram, blahblahblah) so I found it a bit superfluous.

 

One thing I'd mention though is that from what I understand, moving tmp files and such off the SSD is a bit much nowadays, because modern SSDs are at a point where a regular user using it every day and generating loads of those files still wont kill it off in an amount of time within the lifespan of a normal computer. That being said, you may run into issues if migrating the drive to a new computer to run the system maybe? I'm not sure to be honest. I've had some of my harddrives for nearly a decade and they're still chugging.

[Alan_B]

That being said, you may run into issues if migrating the drive to a new computer to run the system maybe?

No problem.

When I lost the use of both my HDD's that took out %TEMP% as well as Pagefile.sys,

and Windows immediately created a new %TEMP% in the default location on C:\.

You are more likely to have problems the old software drivers being incompatible for the new hardware.

[Guest Keatah]

I can't wait till SSD's become ready for prime-time consumer use. Meantime these discussions are great to have.

[Winapp2.ini]

No problem.

When I lost the use of both my HDD's that took out %TEMP% as well as Pagefile.sys,

and Windows immediately created a new %TEMP% in the default location on C:\.

You are more likely to have problems the old software drivers being incompatible for the new hardware.

 

I meant due to its age, not the new hardware habitat. Longevitally speaking, if I may.

[Peirianydd]

Thank you MTA for producing your SSD guidelines document and for starting this thread; as a soon to be new user of an SSD, it is just what I need.

 

Since I have never used an SSD, Win7 or Win8, I may have missed something here but I cannot see any mention of web browser temporary files, cookies etc. I usually, use a ram drive (specifically RAMdisk) for these folders on my rather slow HDD based laptop.

 

RAM is fast, cheap, conserves SSD life and since everything goes on switch off, it improves security as well. I see from the RAMdisk user manual than one can also locate the pagefile to it but I don’t have enough memory on this machine to experiment. I’ll try it when my new PC arrives though.