Solid State Drives are available for several years and offers a significant advantage in terms of speed of access than traditional hard drives.
Installing the operating system Windows 7 on a SSD can improve boot times dramatically, but it is important to realize that the way to work SSD differs from traditional hard drives.
In this article there are some tips for optimizing your SSD with Windows 7
So what’s the difference between a conventional and a Solid State Drive?
SSDs use a technology similar to that found in the flash memory such as those found in digital cameras and camcorders. They have no moving parts, have fast access times, and the information stored on them are ‘non-volatile’. This means that data is stored permanently, even when the power is off.
Conventional hard disk, on the other are essentially mechanical devices using spinning circular drums that store data magnetically, the data accessed by a stretch of data on the move a bit ‘like a turntable (for those of you old enough to remember that that they are)!
A modern conventional hard drive has a read speed of about 106MB / s and an access time of about 12ms. Compare that with about 270MB / s and 0.08ms for a Solid State Drive, and you can see how quickly a SSD can access your data!
Install Windows 7 on a SSD takes a different approach to disk management compared to a conventional disk.
The data that are marked for elimination of a conventional disk are not deleted at all, is only marked as being available for overwriting. Data on a SSD is split into ‘pages’. These pages are organized in ‘blocks’ that contain several pages.
Although SSDs can read and write pages, they can only delete entire blocks. On a disc that is well used, there will be a lot of ‘dirty’ blocks, which are used in some pages and others are available for overwriting. The unit needs above all to copy all the data pages in a block in the cache, erase the block, then rewrite the data back. This can eventually cause a deterioration in performance.
Windows 7 supports a TRIM command to remove the blocks dirt, eliminating those that contain the files that were deleted and re-write data valid when the delete command is received.
Make sure the mode of storage configuration to AHCI in the BIOS to enable all SATA features to work correctly before you install Windows 7 on your SSD to increase performance. Toolbox Intel will then allow you to manually TRIM.
It ‘also important to install the appropriate SATA controller to get the best performance.Download the latest version of Rapid Storage Technology Intel drivers from Intel if you use an Intel controller.
SSD use idle time to perform housework, cleaning all the dirty data so it is important that Windows does not turn off the unit after a certain period. To verify this, go to Control Panel, System and Security, Power Management, “Change Settings” in the balanced profile, click ‘Change advanced power settings “expand” Hard Disk “and make sure that’ Turn off Hard Disk after ‘is set to ‘Never’.
A few other settings to check are:
Make sure the disk defragmenter is off – this can degrade the SSD if it is enabled. Right-click menu in SSD ‘Computer’ and select ‘properties’ then’ Options’ and ‘Defrag. “From there you can disable the defrag, and any time.
Indexing Drive should also be disabled, right click drive, ‘property’ in the ‘General’ tab.
Disable ‘Super Download “, right click’ Computer ‘,’ Manager ‘,’ Services and Applications ‘,’ Services ‘,’ SuperFetch” set “Startup type” to “Disabled.”
Finally, check the SSD OCZ SSD Tweak Utility from the forum. This will allow you to make these changes from a single menu.
With SSD prices drop, can now only be the time to equip the next installation of Windows 7!
