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SSD Questions Concerning Usage/Setup Recommendations

Last response: in Storage
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Hi,
I am a new SSD owner and just installed win7 along with all my apps.

I know that SSD are different than HDD so i want to make sure everything is setup right to preserve my SSD's life/performance .

The SSD i got is Crucial C300 128gb, it is the latest revision (i think) 0006 . Using intel iaStor AHCI Controler driver which also is the latest version ( i think ) , version 10.

Now, I run windows 7, and made sure that TRIM was enabled.

I disabled the following :
- Indexing
- Superfetch
- boot time prefetching
- Defragmentation
- windows firewall
- windows defender
- windows updates


Here are my questions :

1. Is there anything else i should disable/enable ?

2. I notice that regardless of what is going on, even when not doing anything on the computer, the HDD led light is constantly blinking, i'd say 1 blink every second. This happens regardless of the situation, for example just now i tried closing all open application and just minimized firefox to stare at the desktop wallpaper and it didnt stop blinking. From what I understand about SSD, you would want to minimise useless read/write, so the fact that the HDD led is blinking constantly seems a bit worrying to me ? is this normal ?

3. I use my ssd to install all my applications, I dont install games or store media / documents, these are on a separate drive. I use photoshop on a regular basis, and the scratch drive are set to be on the SSD, if i look at temp files folder i see there is a 4.5gb photoshop temp file. I wonder if using ssd as photoshop scratch drive is a good ideal ? I know it is much faster but will it wear down the ssd too fast ?


Thanks for your help, looking forward to your answers.

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I had previously seen advices about turning off System Restore, however i had decided to keep it ON because in my experience it helped me solve tons of problems in the past. This is one of the rare features on windows that i find really useful...

however... after reading Foscooter's link on SSD Review, they really stress the importance of turning system restore off (#3) because they say that within a few week it degrade performance drastically and affects TRIM... This got me very worried as i've been using my computer for 2 weeks now... I promptly disabled System Restore.

Another thing they suggest is to turn off Hibernation (#7)... However I find Hibernation really useful, my system automatically goes into hibernate after X amount of time, i often come and go and it is really handy for me to just have to move my mouse and have the system come back to exactly where i was before, all my programs open, tabs, emails etc... The alternative for me would be to disable hibernation and always keep my computer open, which i dont think is good ?

Also, one of the tweak suggested ( #16) says to prevent the ssd from turning off after X minutes, they dont explain why though, they just say to do this without any explanation why...

I did most of the other tweaks, my HDD light is still constantly flashing every second...
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is easy to reduce the size of the hiberfile like so.
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-reduce-hibernate-file...

and you never want to shut the drive down due to garbage recovery processes being halted. SSD just needs low activity states and power to implement it effectively.

Is easy to reclaim some more space for increased efficeincy by setting the pagefile to static size as well. If you have more than 4 gigs of ram you can probably get by with 1024 or 2048 static. Just use the same value in both the minimum and maximum to set static.

Alright, I set a 3gb static size to the pagefile. I have 8gb ram, but am not sure how much pagefile i need, I often use very large files in photoshop and do a LOT of multitasking.

If i go in C:\Users\Louno\AppData\Local\Temp I can see 3 photoshop temp files, 1 is 4.5gb, the other is 3.25 gb and the last one is 93mb

I took out the time limit for drive to shut down ( set to NEVER now ).

Also, I didnt disable hibernate completely, I simply lowered the hibernate file as explained above.

I was wondering, is it possible to keep system restore enabled but to tell it to store restore data on a separate drive ??? As i mentionned before, system restore has proven very useful for me in the past, it sucks that this isnt something that can work well with SSD...

I cant imagine the average computer user who just got an ssd is going through all these steps, i find it is all a bit ridiculous all these tweaks... sheeesshh

anyhow, After doing all this, my hdd led light is still blinking...

I think you may be doing more than you need to.

1) Is your ssd aligned? Run the AS ssd benchmark. If the alignment is ok, you will get the alignment offset in green. If it is red, then a re-do is in prder.

2) If you need hibernation, fine. Mostly though, if you do not keep anything important open when you finish using the PC, you can dispense with hibernation. Sleep to ram using S3 state is much faster. Your ram contents will still be there when you resume. If you have a ups, then even better. Hibernation needs 8gb of ssd space to hold the contents of 8gb of ram when you hibernate. To save space, do not use hibernation, even once. If you already have, then it is hard to get rid of the space. I think it can be done using disk cleanup after disabling hibernation.

3) I suggest you do not try to actively manage the ssd. If you get some file that does lots of I/O, well, that is what you bought one for. No normal desktop user is going to use up all the writes before the drive goes obsolete.

According to AS SSD my alignment is OK.

hmm i just realised that maybe "sleep" is what i thought was hibernate ??? ... what the hell... im such a noob... i mean i THINK... cuz i clicked on start/sleep and to me that is exactly what i thought was going on when my computer hibernate, everything powers off and there is just a blinking led light on my computer case, all fans / screens is off... when i move mouse everything loads back the way it was.... except... when i did that my computer crashed ( BSOD ) .... second time this happens... anyhow i disabled hibernate now...

But still, overall my main issue was trying to figure out why my HDD activity led is constantly blinking every second... i did most of all the tweaks and it is still blinking... should i worry about this or not ?

What most "tech" do not know is that your hdd light is constanty blinking is not because hdd is working but because of pooling of sata ports. Problem is in combination Windows 7 + Intel AHCI + SATA DVD-Writer. All people with this combination have constant 1 sec hdd light blinking but they do not notice or refuses to notice this blaming it on other "things". Try this - disable your DVD-Writers in your device manager (just for testing purpose). Your lights will stop binking. Very few people know of this problem and because of this Intel is not fixing it. Also, if you revert to Microsoft drivers and add this line to your reg:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom]
"Autorun"=dword:00000000
after restart your blinking will stop also. I currently trying to fix same issue and I'm undecided if I should stick to MS just because of this annoying blinking...
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