When it comes to internal storage devices for the desktop or laptop computers, there are only two popular choices – SSD (solid state drive) and HDD (hard disk drive). Some of the newer notebook computers are also coming with a fixed eMMC (embedded multi-media card) chip on the motherboard and it is used for both installing the operating system as well as storing user files. But there are two problems with eMMC based notebook computers – first they usually have a very limited storage (just like the smartphones) and second you cannot upgrade the storage device yourself (eMMC is fixed on the motherboard).
For the flexibility of upgrading the storage device and the data transfer rates of flash memory, you have to use the solid state drives. And if you want to make the most out of the new SSD in your Windows PC, you can optimize Windows for it using these simple methods:
1. Use SSD for installing Windows and HDD for storing your other files
SSD has very fast data access rates and so if you use it as the system drive (drive on which Windows is installed), your PC will boot faster and overall performance of Windows will improve many times over. But for storing any other files (videos, music, documents) that you do not access that often, you can use a secondary HDD. This way you will have more than enough storage space and still get the benefits of using a SSD.
2. Move pagefile to secondary HDD
When your Windows system has used up the entire RAM and some processes still want to use more RAM, Windows plays a neat trick – it stores some of the data from the RAM to a file (called pagefile) stored on the hard disk and frees up RAM for the new processes. Later when RAM demand has gone down, the data from pagefile is moved back to the RAM. These days computers have more than enough RAM for all the processes and storing pagefile on SSD will only affect its performance and life span. You can move the page file to a secondary HDD without any problem. Here is how:
- Press Win+Pause to open System Properties. Click on Advanced System Settings in this window.
- In the Advanced System Settings, click on the Settings button for Performance.
- Select Advanced tab and then click on the Change button.
- In the new window, you can disable automatic management and choose No paging file and then click on the Set button for your SSD. If you have a secondary HDD, then you can choose it as the location of pagefile.
3. Disable System Restore
System Restore provides very good protection against unforeseen events that can result in system level changes. Using System Restore you can revert your system back to a certain point in time when your PC was working properly. But creating restore points again and again is going to affect the life of your SSD. Instead of System Restore, you can use Macrium Reflect to create a backup of your working SSD and store the backup on the secondary HDD.
In order to disable System Restore for the SSD, press Win+Pause to open System Properties then click on System Protection in this window. After this pick the SSD volumes and click on the Configure button to disable the system restore on those volumes.
4. Disable Superfetch and Windows Search Services
If there are any services that keep your storage drives busy non-stop, these are the Superfetch and Windows Search services. You can disable these services easily from the Services Management window that you can access by pressing Win+R, typing services.msc and pressing Enter.
After this, you can locate Superfetch from the list of services and double-click on it. In the service properties window, click on the Stop button, change the Startup type as Disabled and finally click on the OK button. Similarly, you have to locate and disable the Windows Search service.
Conclusion: Using these simple methods, you can bring down the number of times Windows accesses your SSD and as such your SSD will last much longer.
Samsung drives have a useful utility called Magician that help you optimise. Disabling hibernation and search indexing are another couple of things that can help the SSD. Searching is still plenty fast enough on the SSD with indexing turned off. You don’t need hibernation when boot time is so fast with SSD. Although this is straightforward in windows 7. Windows 10 behaves differently, it hibernates the kernel.