Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives

[アーティクル]
05/05/2009

There’s a lot of excitement around the potential for the widespread adoption of solid-state drives (SSD) for primary storage, particularly on laptops and also among many folks in the server world. As with any new technology, as it is introduced we often need to revisit the assumptions baked into the overall system (OS, device support, applications) as a result of the performance characteristics of the technologies in use. This post looks at the way we have tuned Windows 7 to the current generation of SSDs. This is a rapidly moving area and we expect that there will continue to be ways we will tune Windows and we also expect the technology to continue to evolve, perhaps introducing new tradeoffs or challenging other underlying assumptions. Michael Fortin authored this post with help from many folks across the storage and fundamentals teams. --Steven

Many of today’s Solid State Drives (SSDs) offer the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices dropping precipitously, most analysts expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating hard disk drives (HDDs).

In Windows 7, we’ve focused a number of our engineering efforts with SSD operating characteristics in mind. As a result, Windows 7’s default behavior is to operate efficiently on SSDs without requiring any customer intervention. Before delving into how Windows 7’s behavior is automatically tuned to work efficiently on SSDs, a brief overview of SSD operating characteristics is warranted.

Random Reads: A very good story for SSDs

SSDs tend to be very fast for random reads. Most SSDs thoroughly trounce traditionally HDDs because the mechanical work required to position a rotating disk head isn’t required. As a result, the better SSDs can perform 4 KB random reads almost 100 times faster than the typical HDD (about 1/10^th of a millisecond per read vs. roughly 10 milliseconds).

Sequential Reads and Writes: Also Good

Sequential read and write operations range between quite good to superb. Because flash chips can be configured in parallel and data spread across the chips, today’s better SSDs can read sequentially at rates greater than 200 MB/s, which is close to double the rate many 7200 RPM drives can deliver. For sequential writes, we see some devices greatly exceeding the rates of typical HDDs, and most SSDs doing fairly well in comparison. In today’s market, there are still considerable differences in sequential write rates between SSDs. Some greatly outperform the typical HDD, others lag by a bit, and a few are poor in comparison.

Random Writes & Flushes: Your mileage will vary greatly

The differences in sequential write rates are interesting to note, but for most users they won’t make for as notable a difference in overall performance as random writes.

What’s a long time for a random write? Well, an average HDD can typically move 4 KB random writes to its spinning media in 7 to 15 milliseconds, which has proven to be largely unacceptable. As a result, most HDDs come with 4, 8 or more megabytes of internal memory and attempt to cache small random writes rather than wait the full 7 to 15 milliseconds. When they do cache a write, they return success to the OS even though the bytes haven’t been moved to the spinning media. We typically see these cached writes completing in a few hundred microseconds (so 10X, 20X or faster than actually writing to spinning media). In looking at millions of disk writes from thousands of telemetry traces, we observe 92% of 4 KB or smaller IOs taking less than 1 millisecond, 80% taking less than 600 microseconds, and an impressive 48% taking less than 200 microseconds. Caching works!

On occasion, we’ll see HDDs struggle with bursts of random writes and flushes. Drives that cache too much for too long and then get caught with too much of a backlog of work to complete when a flush comes along, have proven to be problematic. These flushes and surrounding IOs can have considerably lengthened response times. We’ve seen some devices take a half second to a full second to complete individual IOs and take 10’s of seconds to return to a more consistently responsive state. For the user, this can be awful to endure as responsiveness drops to painful levels. Think of it, the response time for a single I/O can range from 200 microseconds up to a whopping 1,000,000 microseconds (1 second).

When presented with realistic workloads, we see the worst of the SSDs producing very long IO times as well, as much as one half to one full second to complete individual random write and flush requests. This is abysmal for many workloads and can make the entire system feel choppy, unresponsive and sluggish.

Random Writes & Flushes: Why is this so hard?

For many, the notion that a purely electronic SSD can have more trouble with random writes than a traditional HDD seems hard to comprehend at first. After all, SSDs don’t need to seek and position a disk head above a track on a rotating disk, so why would random writes present such a daunting a challenge?

The answer to this takes quite a bit of explaining, Anand’s article admirably covers many of the details. We highly encourage motivated folks to take the time to read it as well as this fine USENIX paper. In an attempt to avoid covering too much of the same material, we’ll just make a handful of points.

Most SSDs are comprised of flash cells (either SLC or MLC ). It is possible to build SSDs out of DRAM. These can be extremely fast, but also very costly and power hungry. Since these are relatively rare, we’ll focus our discussion on the much more popular NAND flash based SSDs. Future SSDs may take advantage of other nonvolatile memory technologies than flash.
A flash cell is really a trap, a trap for electrons and electrons don’t like to be trapped. Consider this, if placing 100 electrons in a flash cell constitutes a bit value of 0, and fewer means the value is 1, then the controller logic may have to consider 80 to 120 as the acceptable range for a bit value of 0. A range is necessary because some electrons may escape the trap, others may fall into the trap when attempting to fill nearby cells, etc… As a result, some very sophisticated error correction logic is needed to insure data integrity.
Flash chips tend to be organized in complex arrangements, such as blocks, dies, planes and packages. The size, arrangement, parallelism, wear, interconnects and transfer speed characteristics of which can and do vary greatly.
Flash cells need to be erased before they can be written. You simply can’t trust that a flash cell has no residual electrons in it before use, so cells need to be erased before filling with electrons. Erasing is done on a large scale. You don’t erase a cell; rather you erase a large block of cells (like 128 KB worth). Erase times are typically long -- a millisecond or more.
Flash wears out. At some point, a flash cell simply stops working as a trap for electrons. If frequently updated data (e.g., a file system log file) was always stored in the same cells, those cells would wear out more quickly than cells containing read-mostly data. Wear leveling logic is employed by flash controller firmware to spread out writes across a device’s full set of cells. If done properly, most devices will last years under normal desktop/laptop workloads.
It takes some pretty clever device physicists and some solid engineering to trap electrons at high speed, to do so without errors, and to keep the devices from wearing out unevenly. Not all SSD manufacturers are as far along as others in figuring out how to do this well.

Performance Degradation Over Time, Wear, and Trim

As mentioned above, flash blocks and cells need to be erased before new bytes can be written to them. As a result, newly purchased devices (with all flash blocks pre-erased) can perform notably better at purchase time than after considerable use. While we’ve observed this performance degradation ourselves, we do not consider this to be a show stopper. In fact, except via benchmarking measurements, we don’t expect users to notice the drop during normal use.

Of course, device manufactures and Microsoft want to maintain superior performance characteristics as best we can. One can easily imagine the better SSD manufacturers attempting to overcome the aging issues by pre-erasing blocks so the performance penalty is largely unrealized during normal use, or by maintaining a large enough spare area to store short bursts of writes. SSD drives designed for the enterprise may have as high as 50% of their space reserved in order to provide lengthy periods of high sustained write performance.

In addition to the above, Microsoft and SSD manufacturers are adopting the Trim operation. In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse.

As an added benefit, the Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur. As an example, consider a single 128 KB SSD block that contained a 128 KB file. If the file is deleted and a Trim operation is requested, then the SSD can avoid having to mix bytes from the SSD block with any other bytes that are subsequently written to that block. This reduces wear.

Windows 7 requests the Trim operation for more than just file delete operations. The Trim operation is fully integrated with partition- and volume-level commands like Format and Delete, with file system commands relating to truncate and compression, and with the System Restore (aka Volume Snapshot) feature.

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Before addressing some frequently asked questions, we’d like to remind everyone that we believe the future of SSDs in mobile and desktop PCs (as well as enterprise servers) looks very bright to us. SSDs can deliver on the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices steadily dropping and quality on the rise, we expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating HDDs. With that in mind, we focused an appropriate amount of our engineering efforts towards insuring Windows 7 users have great experiences on SSDs.

Will Windows 7 support Trim?

Yes. See the above section for details.

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

Is NTFS Compression of Files and Directories recommended on SSDs?

Compressing files help save space, but the effort of compressing and decompressing requires extra CPU cycles and therefore power on mobile systems. That said, for infrequently modified directories and files, compression is a fine way to conserve valuable SSD space and can be a good tradeoff if space is truly a premium.

We do not, however, recommend compressing files or directories that will be written to with great frequency. Your Documents directory and files are likely to be fine, but temporary internet directories or mail folder directories aren’t such a good idea because they get large number of file writes in bursts.

Does the Windows Search Indexer operate differently on SSDs?

No.

Is Bitlocker’s encryption process optimized to work on SSDs?

Yes, on NTFS. When Bitlocker is first configured on a partition, the entire partition is read, encrypted and written back out. As this is done, the NTFS file system will issue Trim commands to help the SSD optimize its behavior.

We do encourage users concerned about their data privacy and protection to enable Bitlocker on their drives, including SSDs.

Does Media Center do anything special when configured on SSDs?

No. While SSDs do have advantages over traditional HDDs, SSDs are more costly per GB than their HDD counterparts. For most users, a HDD optimized for media recording is a better choice, as media recording and playback workloads are largely sequential in nature.

Does Write Caching make sense on SSDs and does Windows 7 do anything special if an SSD supports write caching?

Some SSD manufacturers including RAM in their devices for more than just their control logic; they are mimicking the behavior of traditional disks by caching writes, and possibly reads. For devices that do cache writes in volatile memory, Windows 7 expects flush commands and write-ordering to be preserved to at least the same degree as traditional rotating disks. Additionally, Windows 7 expects user settings that disable write caching to be honored by write caching SSDs just as they are on traditional disks.

Do RAID configurations make sense with SSDs?

Yes. The reliability and performance benefits one can obtain via HDD RAID configurations can be had with SSD RAID configurations.

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

Are there any concerns regarding the Hibernate file and SSDs?

No, hiberfile.sys is written to and read from sequentially and in large chunks, and thus can be placed on either HDDs or SSDs.

What Windows Experience Index changes were made to address SSD performance characteristics?

In Windows 7, there are new random read, random write and flush assessments. Better SSDs can score above 6.5 all the way to 7.9. To be included in that range, an SSD has to have outstanding random read rates and be resilient to flush and random write workloads.

In the Beta timeframe of Windows 7, there was a capping of scores at 1.9, 2.9 or the like if a disk (SSD or HDD) didn’t perform adequately when confronted with our random write and flush assessments. Feedback on this was pretty consistent, with most feeling the level of capping to be excessive. As a result, we now simply restrict SSDs with performance issues from joining the newly added 6.0+ and 7.0+ ranges. SSDs that are not solid performers across all assessments effectively get scored in a manner similar to what they would have been in Windows Vista, gaining no Win7 boost for great random read performance.

Comments

Anonymous
May 04, 2009
Glad to hear you are taking new technologies into engineering considerations in W7. Can you tell me if work is done to take into account working with non-volatile memory(memory that keeps the data even when power is turned off) such as MRAM? The possibilities for new features are endless such as turning off the pc completely and instantly resuming without any data loss. Windows will have to adapt to the new memory quickly and for example differentiate between restart shut-down and non-restart shut-down.
Anonymous
May 04, 2009
Yet another reason to enbrace Windows 7 Engineering Windows 7 blogged about SSD support in Windows 7 Manuel trackback http://it-experts.dk/blogs/flemmingriis/archive/2009/05/05/windows-7-forbedringer-mht-ssd-diske.aspx
Anonymous
May 04, 2009
It strikes me as amazing to have that much knowledge under your fingertips thanks to telemetry of potentially millions of computers. Just as Google with their hard drive use paper ( http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/ ), you could post some performance and reliability results based on your data. A massive and very real-world benchmark would come out of that actually. Good job MS. Been an "early" ;) RC adopter for two days now and the only problem I see is sometimes poor Aero performance of my AMD690G on-board graphics (Radeon x1200 series). Other than that it's snappy, beautiful and extremely usable and polished.
Anonymous
May 04, 2009
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Anonymous
May 04, 2009
Statement: "Will Windows 7 support Trim?" Yes. So, what is the status with the Windows 7 release candidate? Is Trim already supported? How do I find/check this out? Great job with the SSD support. I have one and Win7 RC literally flies .... :) -krish
Anonymous
May 04, 2009
A big thank you to MS for providing good download experience of the RC - you guys learned a lot from the public beta :)
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
Where does exFAT come into this? If at all? Will Windows 7 Netbooks be formatted as exFAT by default?
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
Really, really excelent articules, one of the best That I ever read here or even anywhere concerning SSD performance. Thank you
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
Everything sounds really great here except for fragmentation. Your solution is to just allow filesystem fragmentation to run unchecked and rely on the SSD to power through it? I thought trim might help enable a better defrag approach. I'm curious about whether your measurements of performance degradation also took into account filesystem fragmentation. As you know, it's very common for some files to reach thousands and even tens of thousands of fragments, and free space can become extremely fragmented on highly utilized drives. I question whether SSD performance is sufficient to counter this using a brute force approach. I wonder if you decided that it would be better to defer this task to third parties for now, and look at solving it in a future version of Windows. Or, if you genuinely believe this approach offers the right tradeoff of performance vs. wear long-term.
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
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Anonymous
May 05, 2009
If SSDs are attached to a hardware RAID controller (which typically identify their arrays using their own manufacturer's name) will Windows 7 know that the array is composed of SSDs and use the trim function? Will there be a way to manually tell Windows that this array (or single device) is/are SSD's, this one is magnetic platters, and so on?
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
@Maciej Rutkowski : A massive and very real-world benchmark would come out of that actually. Benchmarks based on real world traces are immensely valuable. Some of the traces referenced in the above USENIX paper as well as some other traces from production servers referenced in this IISWC paper have been made publicly available by Microsoft via SNIA to enable research by academia and others. Of course all personally identifiable information (PII) has been removed from these traces. Note that these are server traces and not client traces. System traces can be captured by using the built in ETW functionality in Windows (client as well as server) and visualized/analyzed using the Windows Performance Tools Kit. @bananaman: If SSDs are attached to a hardware RAID controller (which typically identify their arrays using their own manufacturer's name) will Windows 7 know that the array is composed of SSDs and use the trim function? Will there be a way to manually tell Windows that this array (or single device) is/are SSD's, this one is magnetic platters, and so on? Typically the disks behind a RAID controller are managed by the RAID controller and presented to the operating system as one or more units (disks) of storage space. If the RAID controller reports the rotational speed as zero for the units of storage (disks) that it presents to Windows 7 then it will treat that unit of storage as an SSD.

SwaroopK (Windows Team - Microsoft)

Anonymous
May 05, 2009
Not very long ago i installed WinXP on a usb stick after some heavy tweaking, and is running fine. And faster then on the internal SSD drive. I know, not supported nor recommended. But the technology is advanceing, and therefore a possible option. The are getting bigger and faster. Would it be possible for Win7 to install it on a memory stick? If not, a future option? It is not the same as a SSD drive, but still Solid State.
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
The best so far in the blog. Thanks guys!
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
Sorry if I missed it - will FAT be allowed on SSDs? Will defrag still be turned off in this case? If so, isn't this adding extra risk in a recovery scenario? Thanks, David
Anonymous
May 05, 2009
I've just signed in to leave a comment and ask a question ;) In this article you said : "Will Windows 7 support Trim? Yes. See the above section for details" But my question is : IS Windows 7 supporting Trim right now (RC1)or TRIM is going to be supported by Windows 7 at the final release or in a Service Pack ? Thanks a lot ;)
Anonymous
May 06, 2009
@SwaroopK "If the RAID controller reports the rotational speed as zero for the units of storage (disks) that it presents to Windows 7 then it will treat that unit of storage as an SSD." ...and if controller can actually pass TRIM to the drives. to me that is too much "if's" to believe that TRIM on RAID will work from day 1.
Anonymous
May 06, 2009
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Anonymous
May 06, 2009
Oh, and if Win 7 RC1 doesn't currently have Trim, when is it expected to be added?
Anonymous
May 06, 2009
@Chris_7, DarinMS: Yes, Trim is already in the Win7 RC. Trim is enabled by default but can be turned off. You can use the "fsutil behavior query|set DisableDeleteNotify" command to query or set Trim.
Anonymous
May 06, 2009
Very funny thing. I had time to look into RC version and it's even worse than beta. We have issues from 7000 build and more. It shows, how Microsoft is treating own customers. You can delete my post, but facts will be facts (see below). First example:

set UAC level to highest one
go into Computer Management
set Startup Type for Application Information service to Disabled
restart system
many system actions (requiring UAC prompts) will simply not work, you can't easy fix it I understand, that it will need access to computer. But selling system to customers with such functionality "by design" won't be too honest and professional. Second example: like zdnet.com notified, system by default hides files extensions. How many non-technical users will understand, that file "document.txt" in Explorer is "document.txt.exe" ? Third: http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html (I haven't checked, but I believe, that it can be the truth) Please note, that I haven't went into deeper things. For example why system doesn't allow for formatting me partition in exFat ? Why Explorer still can't enter directory, which is "link" ? Why icon for Network Sharing and Center doesn't display animation ? why clear type tuner doesn't have maximize button ? why after enabling displaying hidden files I have two files on desktop ? etc. etc. I have feeling, that nobody (I repeat nobody) is controlling it. There is no one clear consistence vision (what to do with this architecture) and we have mix of everything with everything. This is one big mess.

Anonymous
May 06, 2009
I have the occasional situation where it would still be valuable to defragment, can we override the default policy and defrag our SSDs if we want to?
Anonymous
May 06, 2009
To marcinw What are you saying? That by doing these 2 actions, that no customer will or should ever do.. you got a bug? So.. kudos to you. You're MS #1 beta tester - you found a bug in the RC. And with that you conclude that "It shows, how Microsoft is treating own customers"?! Go play programmer in linux or something.
Anonymous
May 06, 2009
"Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB" - how can pagefile read be less than 4 KB? This is the size of memory page and memory manager operates with pages not bytes. And thanks a lot for this statistic, I've looked for it for a long time. Igor P. Leyko MVP System & Performance
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
@craigbarkhouse : fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify returns a 0, which I take to mean to that Trim() is enabled? The SSD I have is flashed to a firmware revision that supposedly implements Trim(), so the questions I have are: - Is Win7 RC1 actually using the Trim() command in my case? - If an SSD does not implement Trim(), would the above command return a 1? Thanks, -krish
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
I'm running Windows 7 RC 64 bit right now and so far I find disabling the Superfetch and the Prefetcher and Readyboot increases my boot up times. Also Once I disable Prefetecher I dont have that wasted 600 megs of memory or so for that stupid readyboot feature. My Windows 7 now boots under 6 sec to desktop only using 320 megs of ram.
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
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Anonymous
May 07, 2009
@krish4u: Correct, if fsutil reports that "DisableDeleteNotify" is 0, then Trim is enabled. (The feature is sometimes referred to using different names: Trim == Delete Notification == Unused Clusters Hint.) The setting is written in terms of disabling something because we like to use values of 0 for defaults. Have Trim enabled according to this setting, which you do, means that the filesystem will send Trim commands down the storage stack. The filesystem doesn't actually know whether this command will be supported or not at a lower level. When the disk driver receives the command, it will either act on it or ignore it. If you know for sure that your storage devices don't support Trim, you could go ahead and disable Trim (enable DisableDeleteNotify) so the filesystem won't bother to send down these notifications. However sending down the notifications is pretty lightweight and I haven't seen any performance improvement by disabling them, so I don't recommend disabling this setting. If you have an SSD which does support Trim, then you definitely don't want to disable it, because there are some performance gains to be had for leaving the setting in its default form.
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
I'm intending to install the RC on a RAID0 made of two SSDs. Will the installer be able to detect that the drives are SSDs automatically? Is there a way to find out if it has? If not, is it possible to force it to detect a drive as SSD? Slightly off-topic - on systems with SSDs and a lot of RAM (12gb, in my case) is there any point in having a page file above 4gb (say) if I'm not bothered about full memory dumps? SSDs generally being smaller than normal drives, I'd rather not give up a full 12gb to it!
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
indeed, is there any info as to an official response? apparently the "fsutil behavior query set DisableDeleteNotify" also gives the same values under the 7000 beta release...
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
@m.oreilly: Yes, fsutil shows the same value in the Beta and the RC, because Trim is supported and enabled by default in both the Beta and the RC. ;) I should add that very few (if any) SSD drives in the marketplace today actually support Trim. Most of the ones that do are next-generation prototypes. But when they do become available, Windows 7 will take advantage.

Craig (NTFS team)

Anonymous
May 07, 2009
I plopped a SSD into build 7100 RC and as stated it works like a charm. There are a lot of really great things happening with this Operating System, I have people who come to me for their computer needs testing the RC...all of them will be purchasing the Final Release. Thnx
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
All "Certified for Windows 7" logoed drives will support trim right?
Anonymous
May 08, 2009
@Craig (NTFS team): <quote> Have Trim enabled according to this setting, which you do, means that the filesystem will send Trim commands down the storage stack. The filesystem doesn't actually know whether this command will be supported or not at a lower level. When the disk driver receives the command, it will either act on it or ignore it. </quote> So do the Microsoft IDE Controller disk drivers support it? If you have a 3rd party disk driver provider (i.e. non-Microsoft), then I guess you rely on them implementing the Trim() functionality? Thanks for your quick responses! -krish
Anonymous
May 08, 2009
thanks for the clarification. is this the final form of trim to be implemented in win7 (barring any future rtm update/sp)? i am using vertex drives which have, at this point, a somewhat proprietary, functioning trim fw, though we are expecting an ms compatible version in about a weeks time. can i assume you are "good to go" re win7 trim, and that drive controller manufacturers will have what they need?
Anonymous
May 08, 2009
I'm using the Windows 7 RC and I love it. I have only a suggestion for you. To unpin some icon from the taskbar make something like drag-n-drop, to put drag the icon to the taskbar (like Win7 RC) and to unpin drag the icon to the desktop, disappearing with the icon ;) Thanks...
Anonymous
May 08, 2009
PLEASE PLEASE PUT THE CLASSIC START MENU OPTION BACK IN WIN 7!!!!
Anonymous
May 08, 2009
<<"I should add that very few (if any) SSD drives in the marketplace today actually support Trim. Most of the ones that do are next-generation prototypes. But when they do become available, Windows 7 will take advantage.

Craig (NTFS team)">> Thanks for your input so far Craig.. much appreciated. While the bigger folk sort out SSD 'logo' reqs etc.. any 'issues' with a little fella like me trying to disable Win 7(RC) native TRIM and using a brute force propriety trimming 'tool' which would work really well for me on a customised 'schedule' basis. I intend to use SATA Native IDE mode and default Microsoft ATA/ATAPI device drivers with a combined MLC/SLC implementation. By 'issues' I refer to legal/propriety as well as technical.. my assumption being that Procmon can keep me reasonably well informed of what's going on 'technically' between the OS and my SSDs. Regards,

Anonymous
May 09, 2009
Hi, Just installed the RC and there's one thing strange to me: sharing is enabled by default for the USERS folder (not the public folder) and from my other computer I can access everything in this folder and perform operations (read/copy/delete). It was a clean Win7 install and of course I haven't changed the sharing policy for myself. I now disabled the sharing and now it is as it should be.
Anonymous
May 11, 2009
At what level does Win 7 disable defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost etc for SSDs ? I have an SSD as the system drive in my Win 7 RC machine, and the defrag GUI shows scheduled defrag as turned on, and in the schedule, select disks includes the SSD. Is defrag for SSDs disabled at some lower level that the GUI does not show ? I manually turned off scheduled defrag, suspecting that my SSD was not be handled correctly by the Operating System. When I run fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify, I get a 0. Does this mean that my SSD is being correctly recognised as an SSD ? I do notice that on the ReadyBoot tab for an SD card I put into my machine, it says "This device cannot be used for ReadyBoost. ReadyBoot is not enabled because the system disk is fast enough...." Finally, is there a way for me to determine what rotational speed my SSD is reporting to the Operating System ? fsutil ? wmi call ?
Anonymous
May 12, 2009
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
May 12, 2009
@krish4u: I'm not an expert on our storage drivers (I deal mainly at the file system level), but it appears that our ATA port driver (ataport) does implement trim support. This means that SSD drives which present themselves as ATA drives (which I think most if not all do), can support trim provided the drive itself also supports trim. Non-ATA devices -- including USB drives and SCSI drives -- don't yet have the ability to support trim, since our other port drivers don't implement trim. This may change as the market evolves. I don't know if any 3rd-party storage drivers implement trim as of yet, but yes, they would have to implement it for it to work. @m.oreilly: As far as Win7 RTM goes, trim is in its final form. Of course it could evolve in service packs, etc., as the market demands. It's a pretty new market. Drive manufacturers know what they need to implement on their end. Some have provided prototypes to us for testing. @me&er: I doubt there are any legal issues with you sending down trim commands yourself, but it sounds like an awful lot of work to me. Firstly I'm skeptical that you can even get the proper information you need. I don't think you can infer from ProcMon output alone what clusters are in use and what aren't. The file system knows this; what makes you think you can do better? If you get this wrong, you can end up corrupting the volume. Secondly, I'm not sure what the benefit of your approach would be even if you could get it right. By having the file system send down trim commands when appropriate, you enable the drive to immediately benefit from this information. There's very little overhead to these commands. Contrast this with defragging, where if you were constantly defragging everything the cost would outweight the benefits. I strongly suggest you don't try to implement this yourself. @lukechip: That fsutil query just tells you whether the file system is sending down trim commands or not. The file system doesn't know (or much care) what kind of storage lies at the very bottom; it might even be multiple types (think volumes that span multiple disks, RAID arrays, etc.). If trim is enabled, NTFS sends down trim commands on all volumes and lets the underlying layers sort it out. I'm not sure how you can get the physical characteristics you want about your SSD drive. As a start, poke around at its properties in Device Manager (devmgmt.msc).
Anonymous
May 12, 2009
<<QUOTE>> @me&er: I doubt there are any legal issues with you sending down trim commands yourself, but it sounds like an awful lot of work to me. Firstly I'm skeptical that you can even get the proper information you need. I don't think you can infer from ProcMon output alone what clusters are in use and what aren't. The file system knows this; what makes you think you can do better? If you get this wrong, you can end up corrupting the volume. Secondly, I'm not sure what the benefit of your approach would be even if you could get it right. By having the file system send down trim commands when appropriate, you enable the drive to immediately benefit from this information. There's very little overhead to these commands. Contrast this with defragging, where if you were constantly defragging everything the cost would outweight the benefits. I strongly suggest you don't try to implement this yourself. Tuesday, May 12, 2009 3:37 PM by craigbarkhouse<<QUOTE>> Many thanks Craig. Appreciate your responses. Just to put the record straight, I’m not looking at programming an alternative to TRIM and have no wish to compromise I’m using a propriety TRIM tool in beta at the ‘mo from OCZ/Indilinx for their Vertex series with the Barefoot controller. If you guys haven’t got it yet.. I would give it a go. I’m not marketing it at all.. all I am interested in is confirming that it actually consolidates the free space effectively and without excessive ‘overhead/nand longevity issues’. My limited testing ability confirms it initiates fine in cmd/conhost.exe and works along the FS stack with ‘native’ Microsoft storage drivers, writing to the MFT and paging to file effectively with no file corruption identified.. the end result being a noticeable increase in random read/write speed at little or no cost to sequential read/write. Calculations for the longevity of the specific MLC drive is somewhat complex but nevertheless quite acute on the 30GB models, so I will need to compare this propriety tool ‘initiated’ usage against the FS one. TRIM or trimming or defragmentation/consolidation of free space is much the same for my needs.. what is important is fitting this in to how it effects the smaller capacity MLC SSD, as part of a write optimisation strategy. This strategy involves looking at controller/FW Wear Leveling and how it interacts with Win 7 with both SLC and MLC SSD which is why any form of TRIM and Device/OS write cacheing is right at the top of my analysis. Neatly brings me onto this question: If.. <<QUOTE>>for devices that do cache writes in volatile memory, Windows 7 expects flush commands and write-ordering to be preserved to at least the same degree as traditional rotating disks...<<QUOTE>> Q. What’s the reasoning behind Win 7 default ‘enable’ of OS cache/buffer 'flushing' as opposed to the default ‘disabled’ in Vista/XP (albeit described as Advanced Performance afaik). Regards,
Anonymous
May 20, 2009
I have noted that W7 is massivly faster on my SSD's than XP. In my research, I found that Windows XP/2003 have three major drivers. (scsiport.sys, atapi.sys and storport.sys) I have found that SSD's fly under storport RAID controllers and don't do as well under atapi.sys. I understand that the old scsiport.sys and atapi.sys use a form of the C-LOOK disk scheduling algorithm while storport does no software scheduling. (leaving scheduling up to the controller.) Q. Since SSD's do not have moving parts, is the lack in C-LOOK overhead accounting for the performance increase with storport? If so, what scheduling changes, if any, does the new ataport in windows 7 undertake when an SSD is detected? Regards
Anonymous
May 28, 2009
My ocz core v2 ssd isnt detected as ssd. scheduled defragmentation is enabled to that  drive and also superfetch is enabled. So i presume the windows hasnt detected drive correctly. Hdd is attached to jmicron jmb363 controller and is confugured as ide because ocz page said that drive should no be configured to achi mode. and only settings in jmicron are raid,ide, and ahci.no sata mode without ahci enabled
Anonymous
May 28, 2009
Fascinating blog post, thanks very much! I have a question though regarding the SSD in my Acer Aspire One A110. It does not appear that Windows 7 (build 7100) has detected the SSD, as defrag and superfetch are all still enabled. Is there any way to force Windows to see a drive as an SSD? Thanks. Matt Sharpe
Anonymous
May 31, 2009
Fascinating indeed, though I have the same problems and questions. I have installed Win7 RC on a Samsung PB 22 J, which is en par with Intel X25-M in most benchmarks (except #IO) and exceeds in write performance. Cryistal DiskBench gives me for example Seq Read/Write 210-220MB/s / 80-160 MB/s (Avg 140) 512k 170MB/s / 100MB/s 4k 15MB/s / 6MB/s ...the 4k category is the only where x25-m seems to have better results up to 25 / 50 MB/s. Now here is what Win7 did:

Performance Indicator stuck at 5,9 (according to your explanation there must be one deficiency according to your tests)
Superfetch: enabled
EnableReadyboost: 3 = enabled
EnablePrefetcher: 3 = enabled
Defragging: Scheduled and possible
Alignment: no clue Clearly this is one of the fastest drive so I conclude Win 7 did not notice this somehow.

How can what Win 7 did recognize, how do I see the tests Win 7 did and used to decide this is not a SSD?
How can I force Win 7 to detect this as a SSD?
How can I tell Win 7 while installing that this is a superfast SSD to enabled SSD alignment? Regards

Anonymous
June 01, 2009
I have bonus question: EWF (from XPe) & MS Steadystate seem to sequentialize random writes, I read somewhere that such a device is in Win 7 already but not yet functional? Is this true, what is it? what´s the name? can it be activated? This sounds like a must for SSD drives.
Anonymous
June 07, 2009
This new SSDs read , expected more than than 200 MB/s? Thats quite good enough
Anonymous
June 16, 2009
i have 6 SSD's in Raid 0, working fine, but have noticed degradation in performance. As of yet havn't seen definitive statement from MS re Win 7 modding Trim so SSD's can be optimised whilst in Raid 0 array. (using Asus P6T deluxe mobo, Intel i7 cpu) Have heard lots of encouraging talk, but no firm word yet. Anyone heard any?
Anonymous
June 16, 2009
Typically the disks behind a RAID controller are managed by the RAID controller and presented to the operating system as one or more units (disks) of storage space. If the RAID controller reports the rotational speed as zero for the units of storage (disks) that it presents to Windows 7 then it will treat that unit of storage as an SSD.
Anonymous
June 16, 2009
So i presume the windows hasn`t detected drive correctly. Hdd is attached to jmicron jmb363 controller and is confugured as ide because ocz page said that drive should no be configured to achi mode. and only settings in jmicron are raid,ide, and ahci.no sata mode without ahci enabled
Anonymous
June 16, 2009
By having the file system send down trim commands when appropriate, you enable the drive to immediately benefit from this information. There's very little overhead to these commands. Contrast this with defragging, where if you were constantly defragging everything the cost would outweight the benefits. I strongly suggest you don't try to implement this yourself.
Anonymous
June 16, 2009
the ability to support trim, since our other port drivers don't implement trim. This may change as the market evolves. I don't know if any 3rd-party storage drivers implement trim as of yet, but yes, they would have to implement it for it to work.
Anonymous
June 20, 2009
this can get a bit mumbo jumboy for me, but are you saying that that if the raid controller can address this "rotational speed as zero for the units of storage (disks)" then windows will see the raid 1 array as i disk and the Trim tool in win 7 will work on a raid array?
Anonymous
June 22, 2009
So I presume that standard pci ide controller doesnt report rotational speed to windows because ocz core v2 wasnt detected as ssd. Maybe I shoud give windows 7 jmicron drivers when installing not afterwards. Microsoft shoud be more informative with these post.Example information about hdd detection and information about reading and writing changes in low lever.I would very interesting and I guess many people who read this blog. Has it have to be manufacturer drivers or manufacturer supplyed to microsoft drivers or is it ok to install with standard drivers and expect windows to detect drive as ssd ? I usally give windows drivers afterwars if windows detects drive so I can install to it.
Anonymous
June 30, 2009
Using Windows 7 RC, I cloned an SSD drive back to my Raptors and removed the SSD from the system to put on another system. Since this system no longer has SSD drives, is it advantageous to reset DisableDeleteNotify to 1? Many thanks for all of the information.
Anonymous
July 06, 2009
Hi Steven, I was wondering what kind of compression codec does NTFS use. For example on the internet i have heard of people saying the overall transfer rate decreased while using compressed files. I am sure you would have heard of the LZO Algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer Have you guys implemented this on NTFS. The speed and performance gains on a pentium 133 as given here http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/#speed is mind boggling. I have been waiting for such a solution. Awaiting your comments
Anonymous
July 07, 2009
Thank you for preparing such an article is good and my long
Anonymous
July 27, 2009
I start to test my solid state drive on Windows 7 64bit Build 7201. With Windows XP and Windows Vista i made very bad experience, after a couple of weeks, the solid state lost a lot of speed and simple internet browsing was terrible. I checked after installation in Windows 7 that Disk Defragmention is off and also Super Fetch is disables. Disk Defragmention was on Manual after Installation, i have Disbaled now. Super Fetch was active and start at the boot. I have disabled now. I use a 32GB OCZ Solid State. Is there already a tool aviable to check which ssd drives are certified ?
Anonymous
July 29, 2009
Thank you for preparing such an article is good and my long... http://www.parcakontorbayiniz.com
Anonymous
August 09, 2009
Little bit confused about NTFS code compere but no doubt you written best article
Anonymous
August 09, 2009
yes but sure wanted to know more about if you specify about NTFS it would great help by yours.
Anonymous
August 20, 2009
Thanks for the article. Even though I'm not the greatest fan of Microsoft products, I'm pleased to know that Windows 7 supports SDD. As far as I know, the technology is quite new, quite expensive and I don't know any real people who are using SDD. However, I think that it is really promising and I'm waiting for the moment when I can try it myself.
Anonymous
November 04, 2009
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Anonymous
November 13, 2009
yeah its quote helpful with the ssd support im very supportive of that
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 30, 2009
Thanks for the very informative and enlightening documents. Thanks to myself every day for more of you.
Anonymous
February 09, 2010
Can we now expect to use trim in Raid 0 with the latest 2X256gb SSD that allow trim with Windows 7
Anonymous
February 10, 2010
@Fastlane: As far as I know, there are no current hardware RAID controllers that expose TRIM to the Win7 OS. (And I'm guessing no S/W RAID, either, but that's speculation.)
Anonymous
February 14, 2010
So I've read this entire thread, but I still don't understand if I am building and entire new system with a SSD for my boot drive and a traditional hard drive for the rest of the system, what needs to be done at Windows 7 installation time. Can I just install Windows 7 on the SSD direct from the Windows install CD?
Anonymous
February 17, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
February 17, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
February 18, 2010
TRIM currently does not work in RAID.
Anonymous
February 18, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
February 19, 2010
Thanks for the help with getting into the DOS shell. Now when I try to run fsutil it says I must have administrative privileges to run this program. I have administrative privileges in Win 7? I double checked. Do I need to somehow set them in DOS? By the way I found the registery key and checked it in regedit and it is zero so I assume trim is not turned off but Superfetch is still on? I turned off defrag by disabeling the service so it had not been turned off. Isn't there a better way of telling if Win 7 knows I have SSDs. Possibly it can't detect them since they are in RAID 0 Roy
Anonymous
February 25, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
March 07, 2010
There are two classes of users. First, performance junkies use SSD's as a huge RAM drive. SSD's have much higher speed than traditional hard drives. Second is portable usage. they use far less power, are lighter, and are vibration and impact resistant. They last much longer in mobile laptops than do traditional hard drives.
Anonymous
March 08, 2010
Good stuff! thanks for sharing
Anonymous
March 10, 2010
Thanks for the nice detail of information here regarding Windows 7. One question, How much of the information is also applicable to XP? For instance, I've seen several sites with suggested ways for tuning XP for use with SSD, (in particular the article on the OCZ forums). How much of this is good advice (like turning off the page file for example, is it the same for XP as it is 7?).
Anonymous
March 10, 2010
kevin, I have never had any problems running any systems without a paging file. (I have more RAM now (4 gig) than the capacity of some of my old hard drives!) Paging used to slow down the response of my old systems, so I got more RAM than I needed, and selected: "No paging file" under the advanced system parameters. (I would only need 2 gig now to use Windows 7, but I hope to do some gaming soon, so I got 4, and 2 OCZ VERTEX-LE 100GB SSD's.) As long as you have enough RAM for YOUR needs, you shouldn't have any problems. You can check your system monitor for your RAM usage. If things get tight, or you get an "Out of memory" error message, temporarily close unneeded applications, and/or re-enable a paging file as necessary (requires a system restart) until you install more RAM, if you so choose. There is a link somewhere in the OCZ forums to download a free utility from a very kind programmer to assist in suggesting/making the recommended adjustments to XP and newer versions of Windows automatically. It includes logic to allow undoing any changes. I tried it, and it seems to work OK. I am concerned that TRIM may not work in a RAID-0 array. (yet?) Therefore, I am wondering if long term RAID-0 performance will suffer to the point where it would be nearly the same as a single SSD (vs. a pair) where TRIM is working effectively. If so, there is little point in the expense of getting a second SSD for RAID-0, unless one intends to use that method to double capacity. (If I were "mirroring" SSD's, I would also be concerned.) Microsoft may not be able to help, if in fact new RAID controllers are required, unless they decide to make some that plug into a pci-express slot... hint, hint. Happy Computing. Michael
Anonymous
March 11, 2010
Alright, I can't wait to get my own solid state drive.
Anonymous
March 11, 2010
Good stuff! thanks for sharing
Anonymous
March 12, 2010
When does Win 7 disable defragmentation for SSDs ? I have an SSD as the system drive in my Win 7 ACER 8930 laptop, and the defrag GUI shows scheduled defrag as turned on, and in the schedule, select disks includes the SSD (named KINGSTON SNVP325-S2). Is defrag for SSDs disabled at some lower level that the GUI does not show ? I manually turned off scheduled defrag, suspecting that my SSD was not be handled correctly by the Operating System.
Anonymous
April 03, 2010
I guess I'm still confused at the level of Win 7 TRIM support. Is it true that if you are not running your BIOS in AHCI mode (i.e. in IDE or "Compatibility" mode) that the TRIM command is not passed to the SSD by the storage driver? From what I have read only the msahci driver passed the TRIM command and this driver is only loaded when your SATA controller is running in AHCI mode. The reason I ask is that I have a netbook that doesn't allow the option to run in AHCI mode but would still love to use a SSD with auto TRIM. Thanks for any clarification!
Anonymous
April 04, 2010
@Michael I didn't run with a pagefile for over a year now (got 8GB RAM), and never faced any problems caused by it. Maximum amount used in the highest loading app I got is 6GB, which leaves me plenty of headroom. On a site note, all the stuff that Windows 7 disables when it sees a SSD I had disabled for regular disks too, giving me much better overall response and speed on my system. So I guess a lot of these functions are for pretty low geared PC's.. like my laptop @paulgj AHCI and Trim works fine together. Where did you read the opposite?
Anonymous
April 11, 2010
@JoeBaermann I indicated that I couldn't run AHCI (not an option in the BIOS), only compatibility mode which I don't think has Trim in the driver. Thx
Anonymous
April 15, 2010
Really nice. Thanks! :)
Anonymous
April 16, 2010
I love the Q&A. Thanks!! :) Depresyon Panik atak
Anonymous
April 16, 2010
I have an SSD as the system drive in my Win 7 ACER 8930 laptop, and the defrag GUI shows scheduled defrag as turned on, and in the schedule, select disks includes the SSD (named KINGSTON SNVP325-S2).
Anonymous
April 17, 2010
Thanks for the article. Even though I'm not the greatest fan of Microsoft products, I'm pleased to know that Windows 7 supports SDD. As far as I know, the technology is quite new, quite expensive and I don't know any real people who are using SDD. However, I think that it is really promising and I'm waiting for the moment when I can try it myself.
Anonymous
April 17, 2010
I have never had any problems running any systems without a paging file. (I have more RAM now (4 gig) than the capacity of some of my old hard drives!)
Anonymous
April 17, 2010
I have never had any problems running any systems without a paging file. (I have more RAM now (4 gig) than the capacity of some of my old hard drives!)
Anonymous
April 17, 2010
I have never had any problems running any systems without a paging file.
Anonymous
April 18, 2010
When I uninstall a program The SSD does not show the free space. So as I delete program, I do not gain free space. NoW my hard drive is almost full but there are fewer programs instated.
Anonymous
April 18, 2010
Got an Intel SSD, love it. When I went to Win 7, (to 64 bit, so full install), defrag was still turned on. Does this mean it didn't recognise it as an SSD? How can I check? Thanks Peter
Anonymous
April 18, 2010
So i presume the windows hasn`t detected drive correctly. Hdd is attached to jmicron jmb363 controller and is confugured as ide because ocz page said that drive should no be configured to achi mode. and only settings in jmicron are raid,ide, and ahci.no sata mode without ahci enabled
Anonymous
April 19, 2010
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. Drive in, Win7 installed, operating perfectly. It's just that defrag was still turned on (I've since manually turned it off). I thought Win7 should have detected it as an SSD, and turned off defrag itself. Does this mean that Win7 doesn't 'know' that it's an SSD? (Device Manager correctly reports the type of the drive as 'INTEL SSD... ATA Device)
Anonymous
April 20, 2010
Have I now turned off the Trim command?
Anonymous
May 01, 2010
Thank man
Anonymous
May 01, 2010
Thank man Hdd is attached to jmicron jmb363 controller and is confugured as ide because ocz page said that drive should no be configured to achi mode. and only settings in jmicron are raid,ide, and ahci.no sata mode without ahci enabled
Anonymous
May 01, 2010
Thanks for the nice detail of information here regarding Windows 7. One question, How much of the information is also applicable to XP? For instance, I've seen several sites with suggested ways for tuning XP for use with SSD, (in particular the article on the OCZ forums). How much of this is good advice (like turning off the page file for example, is it the same for XP as it is 7?).
Anonymous
May 03, 2010
Your talking about Windows 7, SSD disks and stuff, but can you imagine that today, i was selling hardware in a store when a customers enters. And after a brief talk about hardware and stuff, she asks if she could run Windows 98 on the machine??
Anonymous
May 04, 2010
Your article covers RAID and SSD and states that: "The reliability and performance benefits one can obtain via HDD RAID configurations can be had with SSD RAID configurations." Elsewhere I've read that TRIM is not supported in RAID configuration!?! Please comment on veracity of my information!
Anonymous
May 12, 2010
I also have Windows 7 Professional installed from scratch on a 80GB Intel X-25M G2 SSD. I found that Defrag was turned on after installation, but that "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" gave the result of '0' indicating that TRIM is enabled. However, that shows the same result--'0'--on a regular hdd. Since then I have installed the latest Intel Firmware (02HD) and run the Intel Toolbox utility, but still can't tell if Windows knows this is an SSD. How can I tell for sure that Windows is recognizing the SSD correctly?
Anonymous
June 27, 2010
Question : in windows phone 7 , would it include Office windows which contain edit (excel , ....., pdf-view), or is it only view all applications of office tasks without edit. thanks E-mail : amirhsabeh@naharnet.com
Anonymous
July 08, 2010
wow. what an article. now i am happy and do not worry about my SSD. i was worried and wanted to disable prefetch, superfetch and page file in my machine. Thanks a lot.
Anonymous
August 27, 2010
"No, hiberfile.sys is written to and read from sequentially and in large chunks, and thus can be placed on either HDDs or SSDs." Do you mean that hiberfil.sys can be moved from SSD with installed Windows 7 to secondary HD drive?
Anonymous
August 31, 2010
I'm confused. How exactly can you say that RAID is supported? From what I can tell no controllers support TRIM in a RAID configuration. You get the speed in a RAID 0 configuration but clearly you are bargaining with the devil as there is no mechanism for trimming the drives like a single drive (Intel SSD toolbox). Will MS provide a way to do this that I am unaware of? -M
Anonymous
September 26, 2010
how do i find out if the disk drive is of type SSD using WMI. I check for mediatype, it reports fixed media for SSD and SCSI drives, i executed win32_volume defrag method, it returned SUCCESS for SSD, i am using windows 2008 R2.
Anonymous
October 16, 2010
People, this isn't a support forum! Why are SO many people asking for support/help? PEOPLE THIS IS NOT A SUPPORT FORUM!!!
Anonymous
November 07, 2010
Thanks for the info. Do you have any advice about configuration of Environment Variables for optimizing SSD usage, or having multiple partitions on SSDs? FYI,on XP and Server 2008 I split out the OS from applications (install all Apps to an E: drive), give the paging file its own partition (no fragmentation), and then store data (downloads, docs, databases, and Documents and Settings) on a fourth partition. So what would you suggest for a mixed SSD - HDD environment, with a sizeable (256GB+) SSD and one or more relatively fast (7200 or 10K RPM) HDDs? From the above, I assume that the paging file should go onto the same partition as the OS %System Root% on the SSD, that things like docs and .pst files should go on the HDD. But what environment variable settings do you recommend for a new Windows 7 install, to minimize "wear" and improve performance? E.g., what about things like temp files, Isolated Storage, Temporary Internet Files, Application Data, and Documents and Settings folders in general? Would you split out Program Files between the two storage types? Can you still break an SSD into multiple partitions, and does that make any sense any more? Thanks, -- Thomas
Anonymous
November 07, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 08, 2010
Does this information still apply to current SSD technology or are there any changes?
Anonymous
December 26, 2010
I would be very careful about your statement that RAIDing SSDs is a good idea. There is currently no RAID controller out that that still processes TRIM requests to the drives properly, so the benefits of TRIM are lost when operating a RAID.
Anonymous
December 29, 2010
very good stuff but missing information.. like is NTFS the file system for SSD under Windows 7 or..?
Anonymous
December 30, 2010
I wonder about this: www.win2008workstation.com/.../viewtopic.php And why there is so much disk write activity on idle Windows 7 systems as well? Surely there must be a way to disable or curtail it?
Anonymous
January 29, 2011
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
February 27, 2011
Great article, well written. Thanks
Anonymous
May 17, 2011
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate doesn't disable defrag, superfetch etc. during install. i have to make it manually. is that an issue of my ssd? (crucial c300 128gb)
Anonymous
May 24, 2011
There does not exist any tool - I've looked far and wide and at length - which can determine whether or not TRIM is managing an SSD. Just because a drive is an SSD, and just because it may be identified correctly (or not) to Windows 7 as an SSD, does not mean that TRIM is actively managing that drive. All of us SSD users need a tool to confirm or deny which SSDs are being managed by TRIM. Do you know of any such tool? Thank you.
Anonymous
October 25, 2011
If we assume that your Windows 7 is installed to SSD drive, it is possible to check if the TRIM is enabled or not: In the Elevated command Prompt windows, type the following: fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify Results explained below: DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled) DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled) Thaks to Ram Guy in The Corsair Support Forums
Anonymous
November 15, 2011
This utility will tell you what features are enabled/available for your SSD: crystalmark.info/.../index-e.html
Anonymous
November 20, 2011
I have been using an OCZ Vertex2 SSD for some time now and the performance with bitlocker is downright horrible: Unencrypted: 77MB/s sequential write Newly encrypted: 38MB/s sequential write (not great, but still ok) After a few weeks: 6MB/s sequential write Same benchmark, same software, just a few weeks later. When I decrypt the drive entirely and reencrypt it afterwards, it is back to fast. Performance starts to degrade afterwards until it reaches 6MB/s. There must still be a bug in bitlocker :( I don't call this "optimized for usage with SSD".
Anonymous
December 03, 2011
Does permanent and non tracable deletion really exist for SATA drives ? Does the Gutman 35 really do it's work, and does this method asure non tracebility ? such as undelete and forensic retracebility ?, who is a wizkid in this section of W7 ? I am not the wizkid, and need a little hel, maybe reference to software that does do the job Thanks for helping
Anonymous
January 02, 2012
Hi, Is there any FM RADIO TUNER free software available for win 7, 64 bit HP Pavilion dv6 laptop ?
Anonymous
February 01, 2012
Excellent article, many thanks for taking the time to put it together
Anonymous
April 05, 2012
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
May 17, 2012
Nicely documented and faily detailed article. Thx.
Anonymous
May 30, 2012
Should the "Boot Optimization" feature be enabled for SSD? I recently received a new laptop with Windows 7 and an SSD drive as drive "C:". When I check the Windows Event Log, I see messages like the following: Log Name: Application Source: Microsoft-Windows-Defrag Date: 5/27/2012 1:24:54 PM Event ID: 258 Task Category: None Level: Information Keywords: Classic Description: The disk defragmenter successfully completed boot optimization on System (C:)
Anonymous
November 29, 2012
my win 7 does not care it wants to defrag my SSD until it is dead
Anonymous
December 03, 2012
Defrag (dfrgui.exe) won't even run on my system after replacing my boot disk with a SSD drive. It closes itself immediately after loading. I wish Microsoft had the HDD tools to better manage this migration. Countless hours were lost trying to do this the free way. After a number of failed robocopy copies with all the relevant switches along with diskpart, bootrec, and bootsec commands, I finally got success with AOMEI Partition Assistant. Trackback on generalnetworkerror.com/.../2017644.
Anonymous
March 23, 2013
Can see vertex 4 in bios but unable to get a drive letter for it or see it with explorer in Win 7
Anonymous
February 13, 2014
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February 13, 2014
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Anonymous
March 08, 2014
A common scenario in my job, owner of a music recording studio, is to have to deal with portable USB3 & external SATA disks, used as devices for to record/playback multiple simultaneous streams of audio and video, not necessary in a sequential writing process. This usage creates a severe fragmentation in the disks that require dayly defragmentation, that of course take a lot of time. I found that the SSD perform quite better than the rotation HDs when they are new, but after several days of intensive use the write performance suffer a consistent degradation, giving a worst performance than standard HDs. Initially the exFat file system work better speedier than NTFS, but it has the problem that, once the directories are written fragmented, they can´t be defragged and the specific defragmentation tools (like Raxco Perfect Disk, Defragler or UltraDefrag), depending of erratic circumstances, allow or not to access the disks for defragmenting. ¿Why it is not a tool for to defragment directories in exFat file system disks and why applying defragmentation to this results in more and worst performance?
Anonymous
March 28, 2014
This was nice to read but I cannot get my new Samsung SSD 840 PRO to ADD to the W7-system. It does not come up as a new disk on the disk menu. I am running W7 64 Home Premium. The software Samsung Magican can make performance test on the HDD´s but the Samsung SSD it describes as "Unallocated". The Samsung Data Migration program tries to make a Data Migration from Harddisk to the SSD but it writes that the Samsung SSD is missing. In addition I reinstalled the W7 after physically having mounted the SSD in the system with the hope that W7 should include the SSD in the menu. But NO it did not. I now don´t know what to do further. Can someone help me?
Anonymous
August 29, 2014
Look here www.externe-ssd-festplatte.de there you can find some helpfull updates.
Anonymous
November 30, 2014
That tutorial did not help me. I can't move the mouse over to the other monitor www.topttankontor.net
Anonymous
November 30, 2014
wow. what an article. now i am happy and do not worry about my SSD. i was worried and wanted to disable prefetch, superfetch and page file in my machine. Thanks a lot. http://www.toptankontor.net
Anonymous
February 02, 2015
This article is like help files. I am more frustrated than before because it doesn't tell me how check if any of this stuff is working. How about some of those little blue words that take me to a related place that tells me how to do this stuff.
Anonymous
February 28, 2015
SSD performance is superb. Running it with several servers ( http://www.spectra.com/ ) will give you definitely the real deal. I have shift to SSD and it has blown me away.
Anonymous
June 01, 2015
All this article is just too well explained and usefull, but a question has risen for me. In an old article from Microsoft, their engineers had suggested that pagefile would be best to be set on any other HDD or multiple ones and avoid the system one. After reading this today, i suppose that, that article was made exclusively for HDDs, so i ask now, would it be better to cancel all HDDs pagefiles and use it on my SSD only?
Anonymous
November 12, 2015
I assume this article is still valid for Windows 10. Thanks for insights about questions like Should I move my pagefile.sys from my SSD to another HD ?

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