With the market for solid-state drives continually expanding, we wanted to explore some of the most popular tweaks enthusiasts use to purportedly improve performance and free up capacity. We break out the benchmarks and put them to the test.
Solid-state storage is generally faster than mechanical disks. Sure, once you get down into the 40 GB boot drives, write performance really suffers. But for the most part, SSDs rule. However, they're also much more expensive. Every gigabyte of capacity on your SSD is precious space. And while SSDs are very fast inherently, there are plenty of folks online who'll try to convince you that they can be made even faster with simple adjustments.
Today's story is the product of our own efforts to maximize the amount of useful space you can squeeze from your valuable SSD. We also want to put some of those performance claims to the test using a couple of different drives in order to gauge whether performance-oriented optimizations are specific to a certain vendor's hardware, or if they're universally-applicable. Or, maybe they're entirely untrue, and there's no way to make an SSD any faster.
We'll launch our exploration into the potential of solid-state drive tweaking by testing nine of the most commonly-recommended optimizations we see tossed around once an SSD is up and running with Microsoft's Windows operating system. These include the following:
- Disable System Restore
- Disable drive indexing
- Disable the page file
- Disable Hibernation
- Disable prefetching in the registry
- Disable Windows' write caching
- Disable the SuperFetch and Windows Search services
- Disable ClearPageFileAtShutdown and LargeSystemCache
- Adjust power settings
- Optimizing Precious Solid-State Storage
- Start By Enabling AHCI (With TRIM)
- Disable System Restore And Drive Indexing
- Disable The Page File And Hibernation
- Disable Prefetch, SuperFetch, And Windows Write-Cache Buffer Flushing
- Disable SuperFetch (Again), Windows Search, ClearPageFileAtShutdown, And LargeSystemCache
- Power Settings Adjustment
- Test Setup And Method
- Benchmark Results: CrystalDiskMark
- Reclaiming Storage Capacity
- Benchmark Results: Iometer
- Benchmark Results: Iometer Streaming
- Benchmark Results: 4 KB Random Reads And Writes
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage Storage Test
- What's The Deal With Write-Cache Buffer Flushing?
- Conclusion


Hibernation: Amount of space saved by turning this off is equivalent to the amount of RAM in your system. Not limited to 2GB.
Also, hibernation has benefits over standby where hibernation will allow your system to return to a fully working state after removing power whereas standby requires power to still be supplied to your system. Laptops for example you'll want to hibernate to avoid discharging the battery while in sleep mode.
Hibernation: Amount of space saved by turning this off is equivalent to the amount of RAM in your system. Not limited to 2GB.
Also, hibernation has benefits over standby where hibernation will allow your system to return to a fully working state after removing power whereas standby requires power to still be supplied to your system. Laptops for example you'll want to hibernate to avoid discharging the battery while in sleep mode.
Thanks for another excellent article -- I'm surprised I haven't seen an article on this subject that's as comprehensive. Toms to the rescue.
Thanks for pointing both of these things out. You're absolutely correct about indexing.
I've updated the story for the author to reflect hibernation as well. I added clarification re: desktops and notebooks, though I'd suggest powering down a notebook with an SSD is comparable to putting it into hibernation. I don't think anyone would recommend putting it into standby; as you mention, that continues to drain power.
All the best!
Chris
SSD's are changing faster than any other computer technology. The current generation SSD's are already twice as fast as the SSD's tested in this article. Tom's Hardware is being left behind in the dust with reviews like this.
disabling system rstore is usually a good idea, sometimes it's better to just limit it's size form the 10% default value.
swap disabling is not a good idea, as you said. i'd rather have the swap on a secondary, mechanical drive.
indexing is very useful. you can relocate the address to where indexing data is stored. i put it on a mechanical drive.
disabling superfetch and turbo cache are really useful. ssd may be faster than hdd, but they are weak compared to ram speed. read caching really makes a difference.
hibernation file is not really useful on a desktop but it's a matter of taste. better have it on a mechanical drive if possible
another thing that really helps is putting firefox profiles on a ram drive. i develop on visual studio and there is a directory where lots of small files are written on build. having this temp folder on a ramdrive helps a lot regarding speed and writes as well.
1. save power
2. restore the previous work withou having to start everything
I use hibernation a lot on my desktop just because I can leave all the network independent applications running and just power down. after power up, I am in the previous environment state and can immediately continue whatever I was doing before. No need to start applications and reopen saved files.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/124198-user-profiles-create-move-during-windows-7-installation.html
http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/
@JackNaylorPE... This another very good point on moving USER folder to another drive. It does free up additional space and keep down on writes.
@Chesteracorgi... There are many threads on tweaking, as the The SSD Optimization Guide is a very good one. The purpose of my article was not necessarily on what tweaks needed to perform but what actual benefits do you receive from performing them.
Also I have a suggestion. For example with System Restore and File Paging, you should make mention that you can simply apply them to your storage HDD instead of the SSD.
Oh and what's the point of telling us to disable Prefetch, which has no effect on the SSD and can certainly help the system stay faster by preloading onto RAM? Plenty of enthusiasts have 6, 8, or 12 gigs of RAM so it's not like space is a premium...
Windows 7 does that by default for SSD's