SSD technology is, without a doubt, the future of storage drives. Their characteristics, far superior to those of any conventional hard disk, provide better benefits in general performance and energy consumption. And although their main current problem lies in the price, little by little they are standardized and introduced as a basic component of the configuration of any computer.
Next, we will explain what steps we must follow in order to configure our Windows operating system (from version 7 onwards) and get the best performance to this type of units at the same time we extend its useful life.
1. Check the firmware version of the SSD disk and the motherboard chipset
First, we must go to the manufacturer's website and verify that our SSD unit has the latest firmware available. Since a unit is manufactured, new updates to the device have emerged that tend to improve its performance and solve problems that were not found during its production. For this reason, each company usually has a utility that allows us to check the firmware version of our unit and compare it against the latest available.
In our case, we have an SSD drive from the Trascend brand. Accessing the manufacturer's website and looking for the specific utility, generally under the "Support" category, we can find the application that allows me to verify and update the disk's firmware.
We must note that this process is usually destructive with the data, so we must first take the due precautions and make a copy of our information in a safe place.
Next, we must check if our operating system has the latest drivers for our motherboard. Although Windows is capable of using generic drivers for certain devices, the specificity of the chipset according to each manufacturer makes it highly recommended to install specific drivers for our hardware.
Therefore, we must visit the website of the manufacturer of our motherboard and download the latest drivers from there. As in the previous case, the "Support" and "Downloads" sections are usually the most appropriate. If we do not know what the manufacturer of our motherboard is or we do not know what model it is, we can use utilities such as CPU-Z, AIDA32, or HWiNFO.
2. Change the SATA settings in the computer BIOS
Next, we must access BIOS of our computer and verify that the access mode to the hard drives is configured in SATA AHCI mode.
The steps to follow until reaching this menu vary according to the BIOS configuration of each motherboard, so we cannot indicate them. What we will have to check is that the connection of our SSD drive is made using this protocol and not IDE Compatible, RAID or other.
3. Activate the TRIM function automatically
The TRIM function allows the operating system to communicate to the SSD which set of data blocks is not already in use and can be removed, thus maintaining the good performance of the unit.
To verify if we have the TRIM function activated, we must access the console in administrator mode (Start, we write "cmd" without quotation marks, and right-click on the application, choosing "Run as administrator").
Next we will write:
fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify
If the execution result is 1, as in the previous image, then the TRIM function is disabled. Therefore, we must proceed to activate it by executing the following command:
fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0
In this way, in addition to activating the TRIM command, Windows should disable certain features like defrag, SuperFetch and ReadyBoost.
4. Disable Defragmentation, SuperFetch, and Indexing
Unlike traditional mechanical hard drives, SSD drives do not require defragmentation. In fact, this operation is detrimental to them since additional write operations would be carried out periodically. The operating system is capable of recognizing these types of drives and this is reflected by the Defragmenter, indicating that fragmentation never occurs.
Some websites recommend deactivating the defragmentation service without even considering that SSDs and mechanical disks may be coexisting in our system. It is not uncommon today to find computers where the operating system runs from an SSD disk, very fast but with a small capacity, and the rest of the data is stored on a traditional disk, where storage capacity is valued over speed. Therefore, we must indicate that deactivating this service is not recommended in any case. We can obtain the same result if we deactivate defragmentation, through the Programming Configuration, for those specific units that implement this technology.
SuperFetch is a technology developed by Microsoft and present in its Windows operating systems since Windows XP. According to an analysis of the programs most frequently accessed by the user, it allows them to be progressively loaded into RAM memory, so that access to them is anticipated. However, this service is unnecessary on SSD drives, since the speed of access to the data in them is much higher than that of the mechanical disks and we would not improve the access time to the applications. For this reason, we can deactivate the service that runs it from the Team Manager.
Finally, we must also deactivate within the system the content indexer, also known as Windows Search. As its name indicates, this service is responsible for indexing all the content of the units to facilitate its search for any query made by the user. However, if we take into account the speed of current SSD disks and that indexing operations are frequent and therefore frequent writings are made About the device, we must consider true benefit in our system.
5. Disable or move the system paging file
The main function of the system paging file it is to be able to offer the largest amount of memory available for each program, storing data on disk that is not expected to be used in the near future. However, most current computers already have at least 8 GB of RAM, enough to run most common programs. Disable this feature it can save us several GB of storage on our disk and, if we do not have enough RAM and need this function, we can move its location to a traditional disk.
To do this, we must access the Control Panel and type in the search box "performance". Next, we will select from the results «Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows» and in «Advanced options», we will be able to adjust the amount of RAM we want or the new location of the paging file.
6. Disable the Prefetch function
The last step of our optimization within the system is disable Prefetch function, a service that is responsible for copying recently opened files to contiguous disk areas, within traditional disks, to speed up their subsequent access. This function has little utility in SSD disks, so we will proceed to deactivate it and thus save a little storage space and many write operations on the unit.
To disable this function, you must access the system registry and modify a specific value of a key. First we will press the Windows key + R and we will write "regedit"; then we will access the Registry Editor and navigate to the key «HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \ PrefetchParameters »; once inside we will check the value of the EnablePrefetcher key, which must be 0. If it does not have this value, we will modify it as shown in the image below.
This guide ends here in which we have shown some of the functions that can be carried out within our system to be able to get the most out of our SSD disks, improving their performance and extending their useful life.