How to optimize the operation of our SSD in Windows 8

SSD technology is undoubtedly the future of storage drives, and it's set to banish HDDs. The problem currently is the price of the former, but once they are normalized, they will have no rival to face them, since all their technical characteristics far exceed those of any HDD.

In this entry we will see how to configure our computer and Windows 8, to get the most out of an SSD at the same time that we try to lengthen its useful life. Although it is true that the operating system, in addition to other software, possibly make most of the changes automatically, it never hurts to check that everything is indeed as it should be.

The steps to follow

First of all, I present a list of the steps that we will follow in this article, so that you do not get lost. You can click on each one of them, and you will go directly to the section of the article that deals with that subject:

Disable System Restore.

Verify if we have the latest firmware version of our SSD and chipset

The first thing to do is go to the manufacturer's website and check if we have the latest version of the firmware installed In my case, I have a 128GB Samsung 830 Series, and This comes with software called SSD Magician that allows you to check it, as well as carry out the vast majority of the modifications that I am going to explain in this content, do performance tests, etc. We should also update the Chipset of our motherboard to the latest version, although if you don't know how to do it, it is best not to do it.

Change SATA settings in BIOS to AHCI

The next step is to go to our BIOS and establish, in storage configuration, the SATA mode in AHCI I can't put the exact steps to get to the section where you will see this option, because the BIOS organization depends on your motherboard, and also you could have UEFI BIOS instead of the one you will see below.

The best thing is to look for sections with words like storage, devices, SATA, hard disk, etc.

In my case, this appears when I turn on the PC (you don't have to exit) and as you can see, it says 'Mode: PassThru AHCI' which indicates that it is well configured, or in Speed ​​it says 6GB/s.

Activate TRIM in automatic mode

Now we fully enter the configuration in Windows 8, which supports TRIM. The advantage is that the TRIM commands allow the operating system to tell the SSD which data blocks are no longer in use, and the latter can remove them. Otherwise, Windows would only mark those blocks as "unused", but this information would not reach the storage unit and they would remain unused. The objective when activating this feature is that during the entire useful life of the SSD, its speed is not reduced.

To see if we have TRIM enabled, we have to go to an administrator console (Start, type cmd, open it) and type the following:

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

If the result is 0, then we have TRIM enabled. Otherwise, we would have to use this other command to activate it:

fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0

In addition to enabling TRIM, this command should disable Windows 8 features such as defragmentation, SuperFetch, and ReadyBoost.

Check if automatic defragmentation, SuperFetch, and indexing are disabled

Unlike mechanical hard drives, SSDs don't need to be defragmented and it's even worse when you have one. Why? Because if we had automatic defragmentation activated, we would periodically carry out writing processes on the SSD, and this is something that must always be avoided as much as possible with these devices, since they do not have moving parts that affect their performance. speed as it is actually a memory device.

As for SuperFecth, it is a storage management technology that helps faster access to the data contained in the traditional hard drives. To do this, Windows "learns" which programs you open most often, and keeps them preloaded in your computer's memory before you run them, so when you do, they'll run faster. However, in SSDs this service is unnecessary since these devices already have a much higher speed than we could achieve in this way.

In this section we will also disable Windows indexing, which, as we can see in the description of the Windows Search service, provides content indexing , property caching, and search results for files, email, and other content. This means that it would help us find files faster when searching, creating an index for it and thus having the files located.However, given the speed of an SSD with respect to that of a traditional hard drive, and taking into account once again that the more operations the SSD does, the shorter its useful life, the conclusion is that it is a feature that does not help as much. as in an HDD.

To verify that the commented services have been deactivated after the execution of the previous command, we will press the combination Windows key + W, to perform a search in the configuration options, we write "services" and the option see local services When entering, a list of all local services and their status will appear.

We have to look for the following ones, and see if they are disabled (click on the image to see it larger).

If they are not, right click on the one that is in a state other than disabled, go to properties and disable it.

Prevent SSD or computer from shutting down due to inactivity

We are going to prevent Windows 8 from turning off the hard drive when it is idle. On HDDs, letting them turn off can result in a small power saving, because their moving parts remain idle until inactivity is detected. The problem is that an SSD has no moving parts, so there is no possible saving no matter how much we use this feature.

Press Windows key + W, and start typing “Change settings to save energy” until we find the corresponding option. Going inside, we'll look at three plans: Balanced, High Performance, and Economizer. In a desktop PC we will want the HIGH PERFORMANCE one, but perhaps in a laptop we will look for another one. Whichever one we are interested in, we give it to change the configuration of the plan.

Inside, we select to change advanced power settings, and among the different options we search for 'Hard Disk' -> 'Turn off hard disk after' and set a value of 0 .

While we are here, we will look for the 'Suspend' option and inside we will see that there are 2 calls “Suspend after” and “Hibernation” plus another. We are interested in the first 2 mentioned, which we will have to set to “never”.

The justification for performing these two steps is that every time the computer enters hibernation, everything that was stored in memory will be temporarily written to the SSD, but not It is not negligible since the amounts written can vary between approximately 2GB and 8GB, always depending on the amount of RAM you have.

As I have already mentioned, you should always try to reduce the writing tasks to the SSD as much as possible, and making amounts like those mentioned to be written to the disk itself from time to time is not a very good thing. In the long run, the SSD could suffer, keep in mind its useful life.

Turn off a hard drive that has an SSD and turn it on again will always be a better option, especially if we think that the speed at which the operating system will load will be very fast. But, if you need this feature, you can leave it on, although again, I don't recommend it.

Disable the Windows 8 paging file

The function of the Windows paging file is to prevent the RAM from filling up when running too many programs, exchanging the data on the SSD/HDD with that on the memory.

However, most of the time you won't use 100% of your RAM; For example, you could have 8GB and most of the time use only 2.3GB.Disabling this feature can also save you a few gigs on your SSD, which is important when we have a 64, 128 or similar.

Even so, instead of deactivating the paging file, if you wanted to keep it, there is a better alternative to activating it on the SSD itself when we have some HDD, and that is to move the paging file paging to one of these traditional hard drives.

First, I'll explain how to disable the paging file, although if you want to assign it to another drive you'll also need to do these steps To do so , press Windows key + W, and type "performance" to appear among the results, the option Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows In the new window that appears It will open when entering, we go to the tab called Advanced Options, and in the Virtual Memory field we click Change.

Surely we will have checked the upper box that says Automatically manage the size of the paging file for all units, and if so, we uncheck it.Now we have to select our SSD, select No Paging File and click Set. It will ask us if we want to continue, to which we obviously indicate YES.

If we want to move this file to another storage unit, such as an HDD, once all of the above is done, we select the HDD that interests us from the list, and check the option “Size managed by the system ” (unless you have the necessary knowledge to assign a custom size), and click on Set.

Disable Prefetch

The last step is to disable the Prefetch. This service is in charge of copying recently opened files in an area contiguous to that used in traditional hard drives, so that they can be accessed more quickly. However, if we take into account the operation of a mechanical hard drive, which has moving parts and needs to go through its platters to read and write, and we compare it with that of an SSD, which is a solid memory where the access time to any of your data is the same, doing this is a bit pointless.Disabling it will save us an almost imperceptible amount of space, but it will reduce the tasks of accessing the SSD.

To disable it, press Windows key + R, type “regedit” without the quotes, and run it. We move to the next entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

To do this we will use the list of folders that we have on the left and when we arrive we look at whether EnablePrefetcher has the value 0If it is not at 0, as is my case as you will see in the following image, we right click on EnablePrefetcher, click Modify and change its value to 0.

System Restore

Now we come to a step that not all users have to do; Disable the System Restore option. Although it can be an interesting option for many users, various official tests have shown that this feature assigns restore points on the SSD that could conflict with it, and with the operation of TRIM that we mentioned above.

Having this feature enabled may degrade the performance of the SSD within a few weeks. Disabling this function is not only recommended throughout the entire web, but Intel also spoke about it to recommend its deactivation when using its SSDs. We must also take into account that we will save space in our unit, something important since the best-selling SSDs are small given their currently high price.

If you want to do it, press the Windows key + W combination, write “advanced settings” without the quotes and enter the option View advanced system settings In the system protection tab, we select our SSD (or another disk in which we want to disable this option) we enter Configure… and check Disable system protection.

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