Windows 7 64bit Pro and a SSD drive Options

[Hippiekiller]

I just bought a computer with a 60gig INTEL SSDSC2CW060A drive which had Windows 7 Pro installed on it and a couple of 1 TB Western Digital SATA Drives that I use for all the Data. (not in RAID or anything)
I set up the "libraries" within Win 7 to point to folders on the 1TB SATA drive.

I was just wondering though as the person using the computer does a lot of video and audio converting is there any sort of regular "maintenance" that can be done to keep the SSD drive running at optimal performance?
Also I am thinking that when the audio and video converting converting is being done there are / will be a lot of temp files created. Would it be better to try and point the %temp% folders to the SATA drives as opposed to having them residing on the SSD drive?
If i can't change the temp folders from within the applications then I think I should be able to do it from the windows system properties (Right Click "My Computer" > Properties > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables
then change the entries for
"user Variables" > TEMP and TMP (Both currently point to "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp")
"System Variables" > TEMP and TMP (Both currently point to "C:\Windows\TEMP")

Or would changing those variable just negate any performance advantages of using the SSD drive?

Thanks for any ideas or advice.,

[sora3]

For me, I do quite a lot of photo-editing (nearly a few hundreds in MB of RAW files) and I rarely bother with the temp folder for Lightroom since I'd rather have the speed from the SSD. In your case, I'd say no as most encoding software should be able to de-allocate and empty the temp folders if needed. But I'd keep an eye though.

[GhostFaceKilla]

I wouldnt bother doing anything except checking the following things.

TRIM support should be enabled automatically by default under Win 7 64 Bit - this is the program that keeps your SSD humming along nicely.

To check if TRIM is enabled do this:


1. Open Command Prompt with Administrative privileges (Run as administrator) and enter the follow command.

2. "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" (dont enter the quotation marks)

If the result is '0' TRIM is enabled.


The only really important tweak with an SSD is too make sure you have disabled all regular Disk Defragging on it. This is only for mechanical drives and will screw up an SSD eventually. TRIM does a similar thing for SSD's.

I also disable hibernation on my SSD as well as turning off system restore. These save massive writes to the drive as well as providing more space. Hibernation has been know to screw around with some SSD drives as well. Of course if you need system restore then keep it on. Personally I look after my rig so dont bother. If things get that bad then a reformat is pretty quick.

Similarly you can decrease the size of the page file to the bare minimum to gain more space. On many drives the page file default size equals the amount of memeory you have. This is massively unneccesary. If you do need more page file the program will simply let you know. But is you have enough system memeory then again its not really needed these days.

So apart from the tweaks and checks I have mentioned here, there is nothing else that can really help an SSD and there arent any other tweaks worth doing that will help performance or provide preventitive maintenance. If TRIM is working and disk degra is off your doing fine!.

This post has been edited by GhostFaceKilla: Jul 17 2012, 06:47 PM

[Hippiekiller]

Thanks for the info guys.