Crucial M4 Tweaking

[Damerae]

I've successfully installed my new Crucial M4.

The only fine tunings I have made are:
Updated Firmware
Disabling Hibernate
And insuring TRIM works with my OS and SSD. I didn't activate anything, I followed a tutorial to make sure TRIM was enabled on both my OS and SSD.

I am wondering if there are any other things I can do to increase the lifespan and performance of my SSD. Should I disable file paging? I have a secondary drive which is a 7200rpm hard drive that I could potentially move the file paging over too. Is this smart to do?

Any other things I should do to my SSD? I greatly appreciate the advice.

Thank you

[Saithes]

Check SSDLife, It'll give you an estimation of the lifespan for it. It'll be around 10-15 years lol

[kidsafe]

Disable Superfetch.
Disable Search Indexing.
Disable Defragmenting if it isn't already.

[Saithes]

Disable Superfetch.
Disable Search Indexing.
Disable Defragmenting if it isn't already.

Windows 7 compensates for SSD's and does not list them in the available drives for Defragmentation. Search Indexing is reading, so it won't actually effect the lifespan of the SSD since there is no limit on how many reads can be performed. Superfetch is RAM caching essentially which is also reads/copies that don't effect the lifespan.

[Damerae]

I downloaded SSDLife and it's saying my drive life is only 8 years... That seems low?[COLOR="red"]

---------- Post added 2012-04-09 at 04:05 AM ----------

Never mind... I figured it out.

Am I doing something wrong?

I have a 128gb SSD and have only installed Windows 7 along with 2007 office and a few other applications. No games yet.

I've done a ton of updates for Windows and only have 90.5gb left on the SSD. How have I used up 40gb already?

Is this normal? It's very strange...

[Creotor]

Some of the space is reserved by the drive to begin with, so the drive you got probably had around ~118-120GB available as is.

Certain drives have more reserve-space than others depending on the configuration or controller architecture of the drive. This is for performance and stability optimization, with blocks reserved for formatting redundancy and wear-leveling.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ssdzone/ssd-faqs.html

[glo]

I downloaded SSDLife and it's saying my drive life is only 8 years... That seems low?[COLOR="red"]

---------- Post added 2012-04-09 at 04:05 AM ----------

Never mind... I figured it out.

Am I doing something wrong?

I have a 128gb SSD and have only installed Windows 7 along with 2007 office and a few other applications. No games yet.

I've done a ton of updates for Windows and only have 90.5gb left on the SSD. How have I used up 40gb already?

Is this normal? It's very strange...

128GB drive actually equates to something like 120GB~ after the binary conversion. Windows 7 takes up 25-28 gigs, and your pagefile can take up to the amount of RAM you have.

[Masterec]

W7 Certainly doesnt take up 25 gig, Id say more along 20. With Hib disabled and Pagefile routed to other HDD.

I have 22.9 Gb used on my C:, that is with W7, Few IndieGames, League of Legends and other stuff in Program files that together make up over 6GB.

[vesseblah]

I've done a ton of updates for Windows and only have 90.5gb left on the SSD. How have I used up 40gb already?

Is this normal? It's very strange...

Pagefile is 1.5x the amount of your RAM, if you have 8GB RAM, default pagefile is 12GB. In addition there's also hibernate file that is 1x the size of your RAM. In typical 8GB RAM scenario Windows actually takes about 12GB, and on top of that comes 12GB pagefile and 8GB hibernate for a total of 32GB disc used.

This is why both pagefile and hibernate are recommended to be turned off with desktop computers to free up expensive SSD space. On laptops you want to keep hibernate available, and in low memory situations (4GB or less) you want to keep pagefile on.

[glo]

Funny you say that since I just formatted both of my machines with Windows, VLC, Chrome, uTorrent, and MSE. Laptop is sitting @ 228 free of 254.

You probably don't have many updates installed, few winsxs compatibility files, no SP1, or you're running 32bit.

[kidsafe]

Windows 7 compensates for SSD's and does not list them in the available drives for Defragmentation. Search Indexing is reading, so it won't actually effect the lifespan of the SSD since there is no limit on how many reads can be performed. Superfetch is RAM caching essentially which is also reads/copies that don't effect the lifespan.

That's why I said "if." Both search indexing and superfetch do perform a small number of writes that end up being superfluous as neither service can keep up with SSD read speeds. You have no reason to leave them on.

Plus you want your M4 doing as little extra work as possible to facilitate idle time garbage collection.

[Saithes]

That's why I said "if." Both search indexing and superfetch do perform a small number of writes that end up being superfluous as neither service can keep up with SSD read speeds. You have no reason to leave them on.

Plus you want your M4 doing as little extra work as possible to facilitate idle time garbage collection.

Well, theoretically being that they are on the SSD they would be capable of keeping up with the SSD lol.. If the OS was on an HDD and the SSD was a storage drive it'd be different.

Even running Indexing and Superfetch, an SSD still has quite a bit of idle time.

[Damerae]

Hm... okay. So, should I move the page file off my SSD and to the Hard drive? I have not done anything with the page file yet, because I didn't want any performance loss. I've read that disabling or moving the page file could potentially create problems.

[kidsafe]

Well, theoretically being that they are on the SSD they would be capable of keeping up with the SSD lol.. If the OS was on an HDD and the SSD was a storage drive it'd be different.

No, the the processes themselves will never keep up with an SSD's throughput. It has nothing to do with where the index file is or isn't.

[Drakoes]

Hm... okay. So, should I move the page file off my SSD and to the Hard drive? I have not done anything with the page file yet, because I didn't want any performance loss. I've read that disabling or moving the page file could potentially create problems.

Disabling the page file is fine if you have like 8GB or more RAM. If you have like 4GB or lower, I wouldn't turn it off at an instant.

[Deleted]

I downloaded SSDLife and it's saying my drive life is only 8 years... That seems low?

hehe only 8 years! I'm going to bet you're going to buy a new drive before those 8 years are up. Seriously, don't stress it you will be fine. Save some space by disabling Hibernation (as mentioned) and either disable the paging file or simply reduce it's size to 250-500MB. You can still create a paging file on your HDD, however big you want it.

Disable Superfetch.
Disable Search Indexing.
Disable Defragmenting if it isn't already.

You can min/max by doing this but it's not going to make any major changes to your SSD but as mentioned there is really no reason not to turn them off.

[kidsafe]

You can min/max by doing this but it's not going to make any major changes to your SSD but as mentioned there is really no reason not to turn them off.

Most of the vendor supplied utilities will go ahead and turn them off for you even if you are on the wall about it. I know the Samsung Magician turns off all three and Intel SSD Toolbox will at least turn off Superfetch.

[Deleted]

Most of the vendor supplied utilities will go ahead and turn them off for you even if you are on the wall about it. I know the Samsung Magician turns off all three and Intel SSD Toolbox will at least turn off Superfetch.

Yeah that's true, I just wanted to reassure OP and tell him not to worry too much as long as he follows the most basic steps of adding an SSD.

[Nerph-]

I downloaded SSDLife and it's saying my drive life is only 8 years... That seems low?

Just to let you know I too recently bought a Crucial M4 128GB, and after reading this thread installed SSD Life. Says 8 years for me too. But aparrantly the program gets this information from the SSD itself (so the program doesn't actually calculate it, the SSD does).

I haven't read the other replies so if this was already said, my bad for reposting already known info!