Maximum PC

Hey all !

I'm a total noob with SSD drive ( i received my crucial m4 512GB few hours ago) and have already cloned my existing dual parition mechanical drive (win7-64 / game data partitions)... and its running great (6 seconds to boot to windows, tested all games, etc).

My question is.. how do you take care of your SSD drive ?

1) is it wise to NOT leave your PC running 24/7 ? I tend to do that because I host a multiplayer game when I was using my mechanical hdd

2) is defragging the drive a thing of the past with SSD ?

3) how about registry cleaning ? is it also a thing of the past with SSD ?

4) what other things do you suggest to prolong the lifespan of the new SSD ?

Thanks I just wanted to be safe because 512GB ssd is not cheap !

This should answer all your questions:

http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-ma ... f-your-ssd

The main thing is enable Trim.

Nasty

oh wow thanks for the very vital info !

TRIM should be enabled from the install of Windows 7 by default. You can check if it is, but I've never seen it off when it's available. So as with any build, I wouldn't suggest a simple migration to SSD but rather a fresh install of Win7 to the SSD then move your docs over...or don't.

Defrag is indeed in the past with an SSD as %root% and will also default to "off" on install.

Indexing is a mixed bag here and everyone has their opinion. My first SSD's I disabled it and search was just junk. I enabled it on all the rest of the builds since then, search works great, and I haven't seen a problem. I think it reads more than anything so it's not a horrible thing to leave enabled. What it does write is bad, but *it's such a small thing I don't even care really.

Slack Space or Virtual Memory is another thing you need to judge. I've ran with it set to zero with 6G of memory on very early SSD's with no problems at all, and it's still hit and miss whether I move it to zero on current builds with 8G plus. I'm typing from a PC w/ an OCZ Vertex3 120G & 8G memory w/ it set to a hard 4G (high and low) and I don't see it being hit.

The one thing I do see taking up a big chunk of space on all of them is backup and restore. I left them to tend themselves at first, but when I saw I was crossing 50% of diskspace I decided to slow down the occurrence of restore and just stop backup completely. I know have a restore point at a risky once a month, but I'm done installing things on here really and once a month is fine to roll back to. The early days of a build, sure...keep it tight, but once you live in it a bit and get things settled out, delete all the old restore points, manually make one, then lower it so that it's not a hog of the smallish drive.

Spacemonger or WinDirStat are great tools to have on hand. It's a picture of your drive in Minecraft style so you can see what's really hogging your drive. If you game, you need to note that they're getting bigger and will hog the drive. Borderlands 1 is 12GB and what made me cross 50% capacity.

*Leave it running 24/7 if need be. Whip it, beat it, toss it on the ground, play catch with it...just treat it like any spindle you had prior and expect it to live longer. Since my 1st very basic SSD, every one of them are alive. In that same time frame I've lost 5 spindle drives purchased in the same window from all the big vendors. "I don't care" because SSD's are just more...ummm...solid than spindle/mechanical drives IMO. Today SSD's may not be more physically robust, but they have features to protect themselves much better than mech drives. Just having TRIM was a start but better garbage collection was the key though as to not need TRIM interaction. To just die doing your job in a year is a huge downfall for spindle drive IMO. I fear spindles more these days way before SSD's.

hi Chumly Ty for the reply

Yea I game and when I got it yesterday afternoon, I quickly "cloned" my current hitachi mechanical drive (500GB) into the crucial M4 ssd (512GB) using a bootable thumbdrive containing G4L (ghost 4 linux).. about 1 hour later I disconnected the mechanical drive and booted up the ssd to just 6 seconds into win7 !

I followed the other guy's suggestion by installing ___markinfo (i 4got the name already) and it shows TRIM is enabled. I've also disabled all the search index thingy since I don't use win7 for anything other than PC Gaming. I have a separate linux box with multiple 1TB / 500GB for everything other than gaming

Yes I've also disabled the virtual something pagefile to zero.

I don't and never use window's backup system restore - I always just use a bootable thumbdrive or bootable cd containing PARTIMAGE for backup/restore of my win7 partition. Try it sometimes ! its less headache !

If by hosting, like a dedicated server, it probably won't harm the SSD. At worst, it'll be generating log files. I'm sure with some settings magic, you can have anything it saves redirected to the hard drive.


Yes, and you should never defrag an SSD. It actually hurts it.


Probably. Though I haven't seen much merit in registry cleaning to begin with for performance.


Move the user's directory. Most of the temporary data and saved data for running programs goes into your user's folder. Though keep in mind that if you have a program that has a lot of files in it, it will take longer to start up.

And I'll still point this out since I'm surprised it still works. My work laptop from 2009 has an SSD and it runs Windows XP. It still works wonderfully and I've yet to see it croak. So that might just be an indication of the abuse you can give an SSD.

Oh, I will for sure and thanks for the suggestion. I have a WHS2 box that backs all the other boxes up, but I still want some experience in how Windows handles itself on backups and restoring from them so I still allow at least one to do it's OEM thing. I'm looking for other backup plans as I really don't like how WHS is being disregarded and may not continue after this release, I haven't had a single good experience using backup software restore environments (sure I'm backed up, but I can't use the environment to get it back), and I just don't like the idea of a cloud ideal to restore TB's of data. I'm caller #2 (I'm told) on a tech show this weekend that's sponsored by Carbonite, so I kind of assume I know where it's going to go and may just skip that call all together. I don't want backup as much as I want imaging. Whole different topic :pThat's a good one I always fail to suggest as I undermine it as common knowledge in my own builds. What's cool about 7 is that you can just right click on some stuff and can just point these libraries to other drives other than C:/.

When kept very simple, you can have a small SSD (yours is huge...yes I said it) where programs and the OS reside and store stagnant files (media) on a spindle and not effect the SSD at all. Right click "documents" and move it. Right click "movies" and move it. Same with music and the rest of the stuff that don't need SSD speeds and are better off with capacity. What gets tricky is the hacks that actually trick Windows into thinking Documents have moved and treated as root, such as the Users files and profiles. I've tried every walk through and it's just always been flaky. What's even more weird is that I've only attempted this because everything likes the basic right-click/change folder method inside the Windows GUI besides Microsoft programs themselves. It was FlightSim X that had me pulling hair and uses a lot of space in the /user directory, but it was also a game built before this consideration and wasn't aware that Win7 was going to change things up. However, every game I install has profiles on the spindle but Microsoft applications insist to install on C:/users vise where I've manually pointed them to be installed. Don't get me started on the new Office that really isn't even on my computer...but in the fluffy stinking cloud.

*Sigh* Just follow directions letter by letter if you want to move directories and where "stuff" should be stored. I messed it all up an each attempt, but I more than likely didn't follow directions to the T.

Use symlinks. The beauty of the tutorial I provided is that it requires no registry hacking or anything. Windows by default wants to see the Users folder in C:\Users. By using a symlink, even if the symlink junction named Users in C:\ points to E:\Foobar\Baz\Users, going into Users will resolve as C:\Users. But all operations will go to the E:\ folder.

It's an elegant solution to a complicated problem.

Try using this little app...also download and read the instructions:

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshel ... llext.html

Download page:

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshel ... ml#contact

Nasty