Maintenance for SSD under windows XP ?

[Spillertwo]

There is so much information on SSD's online that i have been unable to find a clear answer to this question.

What freeware tool can be used to keep an SSD in optimal condition when running Windows XP ?

How frequently would you have to use it if your SSD only contained the Windows XP and was tweaked to minimalise the writes to it (no prefetch,...) ?

I'm looking for concrete advise on tools that are beeing used by people today. If you have extra tips for use they are off course more then welcome.

 

[sub mesa]

Never defragment the drive, and potentially leave some space unused so you don't need TRIM.

 

[sminlal]

Probably the most important thing to do is to have the drive consolidate written flash pages so as to optimize write performance. This is the function of TRIM in Windows 7, but it's not built into any prior operating systems and as far as I know there's no general-purpose utility that will do it for all SSDs.

But SSD manufacturers do provide utilities to do this - for example Intel has an "SSD Toolkit" which can perform this function. Since XP doesn't do TRIM automatically it would be wise to run this type of utility every so often, perhaps weekly or monthly depending on the volume of writes that you typically do.

 

[Spillertwo]

Sminlal:
Yes the consolidating tool is what i am looking for. But my first SSD will be a Kingston model and i don't know if the intel tool will work with this SSD. Are there any other tools that are good ?

Anonymous1:
the tweaker tool i already found and this is what i was refering to in my post when i was talking about the fact that the SSD will be tweaked

Sub mesa:
never defrag i also read
open space will be about 30GB at least on a drive of 128GB at all times

 

[sminlal]

I'm not too familiar with the Kingston drives, but I believe that some of their drives are rebranded Intels and so the tool might work for those. You should probably poke around on the Kingston site to see if there's anything available.

 

[sub mesa]

The 40GB and 80GB Kingston SSDNow V-series are Intel X25-M (original) with 4 flash channels (down from 8 for the real X25-M) since Kingston only has half the flash chips the Intel has.

I didn't know about the SSD Toolkit utility though; it seems very nice in absence of TRIM. But i figure it only works on Windows; so it won't be any good for me.