How-To: Optimize Your Windows Profile and Media Storage with a SSD
Posted 05/13/09 at 07:30:29 PM by Will Smith
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SSDs are all the rage for performance-oriented builders these days, but they aren’t without problems. Even the largest solid state drive is too small to hold all the stuff we need to store on the C: drive—games, photos, music, videos, etc.—and the inexpensive models max out at around 64GB of capacity. And there’s the performance problem, to boot. All but the most expensive SSDs suffer from very slow write speeds, which can have a significant impact on your real-world performance.
So what’s the solution? We’re going to show you how to set up your Windows install like a Linux setup—with the OS and primary apps on the SSD, and your user profile and space-hogging games on a traditional hard disk. This gives us the best of both worlds—the folders we write to most frequently are on a traditional disk, while our boot and app load times can benefit greatly from the fast read speed and low random-access time of an SSD. Best of all, you can use even a tiny 64GB SSD without having to constantly manage disk space—picking and choosing which apps and media will be stored on the small drive.
Step 1: Install Windows on Your SSD
While you can change the default path of your user profile using the Windows Pre-Install Kit, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to do it that way. Instead, we’re going to tweak Windows after it’s already in place. The first thing you’ll need to do is install Windows on your SSD, which is essentially no different than any other time you’ve installed Windows. When you’re prompted to create an account at the end of the install, don’t use the account name you actually want; use a temporary placeholder instead. You’ll create the actual account you’ll use later. Don’t install any applications until after you’ve moved your user profile.
Once Windows is installed, you should create the user account you intend to use. Go to the Control Panel and search for Add User. Create your account, but don’t log in yet.
We’ve tested our procedure with Windows Vista and Windows 7 Beta 1, but it should work with XP as well if you adjust the paths yourself (Vista and Windows 7 store user profile in C:\Users by default, XP is C:\Documents and Settings). Once Windows is installed and updated with drivers and security patches, you’ll need to set up the partitions on your hard disk.
We created two partitions on our hard disk, one for the user profile and one for games and other large applications. To access the partitioning tools, right-click Computer in the Start Menu and click Manage. Go to Disk Management. Then, right-click your hard disk and create a new partition. We made each partition roughly half of the drive, but if you have a lot of media files, you may want to make your user profile partition larger than your game partition. Once the two partitions have been formatted as NTFS, you can continue to the next step.
Step 2: Copy Your Profiles
Next, you’ll want to assign a drive letter to your user profile drive. We chose U:\, but you can use whatever letter you prefer. In U:\, you’ll need to create a folder called Users. Now, reboot your computer and go into Safe Mode by pressing F8 as it boots. Once you’re in Safe Mode, go to C:\Users and copy the Default and Public folders to U:\Users\Default and U:\Users\Public. You’ll likely find some *.tmp files that simply won’t copy; it’s OK to skip them.
After that’s done, you should open the registry editor (press the Windows key on your keyboard and type regedit). Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. In that folder, you need to change the value of the Default key to U:\Users\Default, the Public key to U:\Users\Public, and the ProfilesDirectory to U:\Users. Reboot your PC and log in using the account you created in step 1. During the login, Windows will create your new user account, which should be in U:\Users.
Step 3: Wrapping up Loose Ends
If you didn’t take our advice in step 1 and start with a clean install, this is the point at which you should copy the contents of your old user profile into your new directory. Rather than doing a wholesale copy/paste of the whole directory, it’s safer to only pull the files you need.
You’ll also want to open the registry and do a Find for C:\Users. We found about 20 instances on our test machines, even in a fresh account. While there are some tools that will do an automatic find and replace on the registry, we chose to manually use regedit so we could verify each change ourselves. Open regedit (type regedit after pressing the Windows key), click Computer at the top of the left pane, and then go to the Edit menu and click Find. Type C:\Users and click Find. Then manually change each key to U:\Users. Press F3 to find the next instance, and keep at it until you've changed all the entries. Reboot your PC, then restart regedit and search one final time to ensure you didn't miss any entries.
If you're doing this on a machine that's been used, there will likely be a massive number of registry changes necessary. In that case, download Registry Finder (www.acelogix.com/regfinder.html, 30-day trial) to automate some of the process. While it’s not perfect, Registry Finder will find and change many of the entries for you. You'll still want to do a manual search with regedit, but Registry Finder could save you an hour of copy/pasting.
At this point, you could delete C:\Users if you so desire. We find that it's better to leave the folder, so that even poorly behaved apps that use a hardcoded profile path will continue to work. You should, however, occasionally check the C:\Users folder to see if any files have popped up there.
At this point, your Windows install is ready to go. However, before you install any big apps, you should mount your games partition so you don't waste precious space on the SSD for games.
Step 4: Create a Place for Games
Now, we're going to mount your games partition in the file system. First, you create a folder in your C:\Program Files directory (or C:\Program Files (x86) on 64-bit Windows) called Games. Go back to the Computer Management console and click Disk Management. Right-click the Games partition and select Change Drive Letter and Paths. Select any drive letters that are currently being used and click Remove, then click Add. Select "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder", and browse to the Games folder you just created. Now anything you install at C:\Program Files\Games will actually be stored on your hard disk, and not your SSD. Paths and permissions will also be inherited. Be sure not to mount your Games folder to any additional drives.
Difference with Moving App Path?
Submitted by WesInSV on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 5:57pm
Vista, not XP.
What is the difference in performance between this and moving the folders (Local, LocalLow and Roaming) to the other drive via right-click, "Target" and move? That does move most of the stuff - and without mangling the registry.
It's also possible to put the dumb folders like searches in a lower-level directory, with documents and music where they're easy to reach by the same method.
Just Curious.
Submitted by rennhack on Thu, 07/02/2009 - 5:57pm
I just followed these instruction to Optimize my (Turn on Bragging) New i7 650 with 24GB Ram, a 160 GB Intell X25-M, and a 2TB WD HD.
I already had a user account setup, so I had a lot of registry changes to make. The program they suggested costs $20, with no way to test the replace function, which is a little hidden. I searched for a free alternative, and found one.
Googled "Free Registry search and replace", and found a free program called "Registry Replace", it worked just fine on my Win 7 RC 64-bit in win XP compatiablity mode.
Just my 2 cents.
Mid-level performance
Submitted by chaosdsm on Fri, 06/12/2009 - 4:12am
Mid-level performance (100MB/sec seq write), 128GB SSD - $280 (compared to $170 for similar performing 64GB models) still not cheap, but not totally outrageous either... plenty of room for OS, Applications, & plenty of games. Heck my gaming rig only has an 80GB 1st gen SATAII hard drive with about 1/3 of that as free space.... at least till I rebuild it with the pair of brand new 74GB Raptor's I have sitting here. Sure Random Access Write speeds are still pathetic, but get real, exactly how often is the computer going to be performing random access writes anyway...
Submitted by malebolgia on Thu, 05/21/2009 - 5:08am
If you're a big PC gamer, wouldn't it make more sense to keep the games on the SSD (for performance reasons)?
Submitted by docmri on Sun, 05/17/2009 - 6:55am
Cool article. I am in the process of building a machine (am kind of new to this) and had already bought a intel 25-m and a 300g velaciraptor with the idea of doing this kind of boot system with the SSD.
Question: If I am going to be saving pic, docs, video files to the 300gb drive anyways is there ary benefit of me setting it up this way? I tend to keep all of my emails (going back years etc) assume these go onto the user profile as well . However, even with much eamil I assume the space it takes up is very small.
If my intenet is only to put the OS and commomly used apps on the ssd while TRYING to remember to always save media and data elesewhere is there any benefit to my doing this>?
thanks
Submitted by tarp0123 on Thu, 05/14/2009 - 11:19am
I work on unix systems quite a bit and I really appreciate the filesystem based of the starting point of / (root) with no drive letters to mess with. Starting with windows 2000 you can have your drives mounted in this fashion also instead of using a drive letter. The only drive letter you would have to use is C.
- Backup data in the C:\Users location
- Delete the content from C:\Users
- Using Disk Management, Create a partition on another drive to hold this information. Do not assign a drive letter, instead choose volume mount point and specify C:\Users.
- There you have it. No registry changes neccesary.
This is also a great technique if you need more space on your C volume and don't want to mess with ghosting or imaging to a new drive.
Submitted by ka0s5150 on Thu, 05/14/2009 - 7:13am
If you want to do the same in xp search the registry for PofileImagePath, Once at the root of ProfileList select the SID of the user you just created (you can find out by the path name of profile ex. C:\documents and settings\useryoumade) then change the paths.
Submitted by darklordjac on Thu, 05/14/2009 - 4:32am
naww the first step is to buy the little fucking expensive thing...only thing stopping me is its price
Submitted by rob41 on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 6:14pm
Excellent article Will!
I have a 32 Gig SSD for my OS and the folders in the "users" folder, I moved to my 250Gig HDD on my laptop.
I love the fast boot times and like not mukking things up on the OS SSD.
However, your way is much better and it looks like I'm gonna be doing a clean install again.
Good job on the tutorial!
Submitted by sundawg on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 1:58pm
I have an ASUS G50 with a 320 GB hard drive and an empty bay begging for an SSD, with the goal of increasing both performance and battery life. Since games and battery life never meet, I like developing a split like the one above, but I wonder how much of the users folder should stay on the SSD to keep the drive sun down on battery. My thought was to keep everything on the SSD and use the libraries in Win 7 to connect to files on my hard drive.
Submitted by Th3MadScientist on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 1:41pm
Who keeps their media files in their user profile anymore? Not I, this article is pointless, sure you will get a nice fast boot time and save space but almost everyone keeps their media on a backup harddrive where storage is valued more then speed. Space is not of concern. People are worried about failure of the flash memory, I believe that most MLC SSD's can have 10gigs written to it each day for 5 years and still be okay.
This article kills the whole notion of speeding up applications. Sure you save space by putting your games on a mechanical harddrive, but guess what, when you load up that game, it's going to be loading from the traditional harddrive, enjoy the longer wait of the loading screen.
Actually, I keep my media
Submitted by willsmith on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 3:13pm
Actually, I keep my media files on a network shares, then I create symbolic links inside the appropriate folders on the network shares.
That said, I think you'd be surprised at the number of people who store their media in the default directories.
Submitted by muddled2 on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 1:32pm
I think there's a bit more to SSD optimisation than this. OCZ's Forum on the subject is an excellent resource on this. Normal optimizations include:
a) Partitioning the disk to receive the OS install on a particular boundary; this can have large impacts on performance, stuttering on earlier ssds etc. I believe Vista defaults to the right boundary, but not XP.
b) Cutting out unnecessary writes: SSDs have a lifetime determined by the maximum writes that can be sustained on any part (applies, I think, only to MLC technology SSDs - the more common/cheaper variety) As a result, SSD have a write algorithm that spreads the write pattern across the disk evenly. Under this heading comes such items as switching off indexing (designed to overcome access times on normal disks, moving temporary files/folders to the non SSD drive, including Internet Explorer/Firefox web caches, /temp etc. and moving paging files to hard disk.I dual-boot Vista and Linux(s) off a single 60GB SSD. Nice load times - once it gets past the BIOS (a bit slow because I've got a bios bug & it has to go through a RAID load) with 30 secs pretty typical to a working desktop.
Biggest bugbear ? Vista SP2's fabulous winsxs folder - taking a whopping 10GB of my precious SSD. Hhhmmmm.
Submitted by avramLAPTOP on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 1:24pm
Would you recommend putting the paging file on the SSD or on the hard drive? Clearly, the SSD is faster, but the paging file eats a lot of write cycles and a lot of storage space.
Purpose of moving user profiles
Submitted by msnight04 on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 1:01pm
By moving the profiles off of the SSD, you are ensuring that no media (i.e. pictures, music, videos) are being stored there by default. The purpose of the SSD in this article was to increase performance while using Windows and any installed programs. The user profiles just take up limited space for additional software to be installed. You need to remember that the SSD used in this article is only 64GB and
only having a few videos stored on that drive could easily fill it up.________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Even the smallest breeze can cause big things to turn!
Submitted by chronium on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 12:43pm
Why do you want to move Profiles off the SSD?
Submitted by Defiant on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 12:49pm
Because they can get really big
Submitted by borricua on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 2:42pm
isn't windows embedded a better chose for ssd?
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