Moving from your old hard disk drive to a new solid state drive is a great way to upgrade your system. SSD’s (solid state drives) are extremely fast, quiet and efficient. However, there are a few differences between these two types of storage and SSDs require a bit of system tweaking to ensure your getting the most out of your new drive.
Drive Indexing
Indexing is used to speed up file queries and dosen’t really need to be used with a SSD considering their read performance is already fast.
Indexing can be disabled by clicking Start Menu>Right-Click Computer>Manage>Services and Applications>Services>Right-Click Windows Search>Properties. Locate Start Up Type>Select Disabled and then click OK.
Defragmentation
SSDs are fundamentally different when it comes to how they store data. SSDs do not need to be defragmented. Defragmenting a SSD will only shorten the lifespan of the drive by performing unnecessary read/write operations.
Windows will automatically defragment your drives unless you head into your settings and change the defaults. Here is how you can turn off defragment scheduling.
Click Start Menu> All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter. Then, click on the Configure Schedule button. Then simply uncheck the Run on a schedule check box and click OK.
You can also completely disable defragmenting through the Computer Management settings.
Start Menu> Right Click Computer>Manage>Services and Applications>Services. Locate “Disk Defragmenter” and right click on it, then change the “Start up type” to Disabled.
Page file
This option involves disabling the pagefile. Your pagefile is used as virtual memory and if you lack a decent amount of system RAM, you should consider asking Windows to use another drive besides your SSD to use for your pagefile rather then completely disabling it, as this could lead to performance issues.
Disabling your pagefile can be beneficial to your SSD as it reduces the amount of writes to the drive.
To disable your pagefile click Start Menu>Right-Click Computer>Properties>Advanced System Settings>Advanced Tab>Settings under “Performance”>Advanced Tab>Click Change under “Virtual Memory”> Uncheck “Automatically Manage Paging File Size for all Drives” then click “No Paging File> then click SET and OK. You should reboot your computer after this is done.
If you were considering just changing the drive that handles the pagefile instead follow the directions above up until you reach the, “Automatically Manage Paging File Size for all Drives” option and simply uncheck and choose a drive to manage your pagefile.
Temporary File Storage
Consider changing where your temporary files are being stored. Click>Start Menu>Right-Click Computer>and select Properties. Click Advanced System Settings and move to the advanced tab, then click Environment Variables. Change the folder and drive that your temporary files are saved to. This will reduce read/write operations to your SSD.
MAC
As for Mac users, the latest version of OS X supports the TRIM command which will handle what’s called “Garbage Collection”, which it does independent of the firmware on the drive itself. TRIM will essentially increase OS performance by making sectors available when needed.
As you can see the main objective here is to do as few read/write operations as possible in order to extend the life of your SSD. As technology advances, we should see a better life expectancy for these drives and new support from operating systems that will optimize for SSD usage.