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SSD Help
I just got a new computer with an SSD and a magnetic hard drive, but had a few questions.
From what I understand the only problem with SSDs is that when you read/write a bunch the data cells run out of uses. When this happens, does it actually cause a problem or does the device know a certain cell is out and just skips it when I try to write something onto the SSD? If thats the case then will continuous reading/writing on the SSD for years just lower its overall storage capacity?
Right now I have the OS, my antivirus software and drivers installed on the SSD. It also came with IE and some other windows extras installed on the SSD. If I use IE installed on the SSD, does that mean the browser will maintain a TEMP files folder on the SSD thus reading/writing a bunch whenever I'm browsing/streaming video and lowering the overall life of the SSD?
To install things on the hard drive should I just create a folder called Program_Files and just write in the correct path for installers? or is there a way to setup the hard drive as the default install drive for everything?
Is there any issues with having the antivirus software on a different drive than the files which will probably contain the viruses?
Lastly, I download/drag a lot of things to my desktop which is located on the SSD. Is there a way to make the desktop folder use the magnetic drive instead?
Comments
only os is needed on the ssd
nothing else since you will deactivate paging file anyway the only thing that can be slowing down stuff is os the rest is all internal stuff(no paging file means it goes as fast as it can in the computer)
so just put os on ssd maybe the game of the month mmo you play but thats it the rest put it all on the other hard drive
anti-virus would have been a good idea but since its so hard on hd i suggest you put it on the other drive also!
There's 2 issues with used SSD cells. With an SSD drive it's much faster to write to the drive than to delete off it. To prevent this from impacting performance SSD's don't actually delete the data off it when you overwrite/delete something, it just 'marks' it as deleted. What this means is if you have an 80GB drive, once you've written out 80GB (even if you've deleted files to make space), the drive will technically be full and it will start having to delete those marked cells. This seriously impacts performance.
So there's 2 ways around this, one is to use Windows 7 and update the firmware on your SSD to support the TRIM command which a lot of the newer ones now do. Trim will real-delete the files in the background after the current file operation is finished, making that space open for use instead of waiting for the drive to get full.
The other is, there is some tool I believe you can use to wipe the empty cells every once in a while, so that your SSD is ready to go. Kinda like defragging once in a while to keep your drive in shape.
The other thing you've heard about used SSD cells is they have a limited amount of times they can be written to. This isn't something to worry about though.. it's suppose to be something upwards of 100,000 times i think? Thing is those cells are almost guaranteed to be unusable once they've been written that many times but this number at heavy usage is at least the expected lifetime of a platter drive (5+ years) so there's not really any difference in reliability.
When you do hit the limit the individual cells will be shut off and you'll just lose space on the drive. In fact an 80GB SSD is actually something like a 90GB SSD with a bunch of 'reserve' cells to cover for this very fact - when a cell becomes unusable it starts using one of the reserves. Also gaming doesn't really work a HD like that so it should last nearly forever.
Now for the temp files, from what I've heard with Win7 is it's smart enough to know not to write temp files out to an SSD but I haven't researched it. I just remember reading Win7 won't abuse it. There is a way to change where IE stores its temp files, and you can change the Windows temp folder as well. If Win7 is writing these to SSD, and you don't have TRIM, you may want to change these to your platter drive.
I've read that AV software is much more read intensive than write intensive, in that case shouldn't I keep it on the SDD?
For the TRIM comment, if I let the cells be deleted instead of just flagged as deleted, will the OS try to immediately reuse those cells? From reading what you posted it sounded like without TRIM the cells get flagged for deletion, but aren't actually used until every other cell is used. That would spread out the writes and increase the longevity of the drive as a whole (though all the cells would fail at the same time once they run out of writes). Is that interpretation wrong?
Ok I think this is what I'm going to do to set up the SSD, does it sound right?:
uninstall IE and reinstall it on my hdd
move the temporary internet folders for both IE and FF to the hdd
TEMP and TMP environment variables to a folder in hdd
change the Desktop location to a folder on the hdd
disable defragmenting on the SDD
disable the paging file on the SDD and create one on the hdd
I also read on this site
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/10/optimize-windows-for-solid-state-drives-usage/
something about enabling cache writing and disabling the Indexing Service, but I don't really know what these are so might not do them.
Doesn't really matter where you keep the AV software, it gets loaded into memory then the HD access is all reads based off where the data you're scanning is. There's no writes involved except if you have a log file turned on.
Interesting thought, in the past the OS used to progress through the drive linearly. If you deleted data off the beginning of the drive it wouldn't start using that part of the drive until it had finished progressing all the way to the end of the drive. I *think* when you reboot it starts from the top of the drive again for its write position. But Windows may use the drive much differently these days anyway, so I don't know. I also wouldn't be surprised if SSD's have a wear balancing algorithm anyway.
I would keep IE itself on your SSD. You can change the location of the temp folder it uses someplace in the internet options, and put that temp folder on the platter drive if you want. Win7 is automatically not suppose to defrag SSD's but doesn't hurt to set it.
Dont think you have to worry about that.. an SSD disk lasts for about 1,200,000 hours which is longer then normal ones. Planing to buy a new computer myself on monday with SSD
I've said this before, you shouldn't disable paging file as some programs will stop working. It's not even needed with ssd.
Required setting with ssd begins:
Get a windows 7.
Required setting with ssd ends.
You don't have to change any settings with windows 7, it's designed for ssd usage and will automatically choose the best settings.