See the best sellers in Internal Solid-State Drives.
Your PC still doesn't have an SSD? Admit it, your computer is from another era, that of slowed computers and the internet at a snail's pace. Whether laptop or desktop, a computer with a Solid State Disk or SSD disk is the best option to fly over the network. If you want to optimize your SSD to reach its maximum speed, follow these 10 tricks that we give you below.
Read about external storage with wifi
What is an SSD?
 |
| Imagen de PagDev en Pixabay |
Solid state hard drives or SSDs can reach speeds up to 100 times faster than a “normal” disk, just like the next generation NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD drives. The writing speed in these cases reaches up to 7000 MB / s, something that is impossible to achieve with a hard disk of a lifetime. To reach these quotas, it is essential to know how to configure your SSD, but do not worry, because today we are here for that.
Whether you have an SSD installed on your computer or if you are thinking of installing it, here we are going to give you some recommendations so that you can speed up your hard drive. In addition, we are also going to give you some tips to increase the life of your SSD, something that should be taken into account. Some of the notes that we are going to give you next carry a certain level of knowledge regarding the fiddling of the configuration of your computer.
1. Speed up your SSD by enabling AHCI
The AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) is the Advanced Host Controller Interface. It is important that this is active if we want our Windows to favor our SSD so that it performs more. To enable this option, we must access from the computer's BIOS and activate it from the configuration or settings. In any case, if it can be, it is better to activate the AHCI before installing Windows on our PC.
If it is not possible, there would be no problem as long as the BIOS allows us to activate it anyway. We can find this option in different places within the BIOS settings, but normally we will find it in the Advanced Options section -> SATA or storage configuration.
2. Enable TRIM to increase the life of your SSD
It seems silly, but the TRIM prevents the degradation of the hard disk, so, if we want to extend the life of our SSDs, enabling it is a good idea. Windows 10 should have this option enabled by default, but if you want to make sure you can do it from the system command line. We open a command prompt window and type the command "fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0". Remember to run it as administrator.
3. Enable or disable disk defragmenter?
The disk defragmenter has always helped us to organize documents on our computer and remove cache. About having this option enabled or not when we have an SSD installed there are many theories around the network, but with the latest changes introduced in Windows 10, the correct thing to do seems to leave it enabled.
With the arrival of SSDs, it was found that the defragmenter caused a considerable reduction in the number of read and write cycles, so it was detrimental to have it activated. It made the disk somewhat slower and a more heavily loaded process that caused the SSD to wear out quickly.
However, with Windows 10 this problem has disappeared. The defragmenter is now called "Drive Optimizer" and it does not harm performance or wear out our SSD. As we think this is a good thing, since the process that is carried out is different from that of defragmenting the SSD, it is best to leave it activated so that it runs periodically. We can change the settings to run daily, weekly, or monthly. We recommend the latter.
4. The Prefetch and the Superfetch
The Prefetch is a service in charge of copying files that have been recently opened and storing them in an area adjacent to the hard disk. It serves so that when they are accessed again, it can be done quickly. It is not necessary to have the prefetch activated because the SSD does this job and takes the same time to access a file. This is why this service loses its meaning a bit, so having it activated is only consuming RAM.
The Superfetch is a service that handles preloading widely used programs on our team. Like the prefetch, it uses memory space to accelerate that fast start and it is quite absurd to have it activated, since we are eating a space of RAM that our SSD can take advantage of, since it is capable of doing the same just as fast.
To deactivate Prefetch and Superfetch, open the Windows "Registry Editor" and navigate to the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \ PrefetchParameters. Once here we will set the value 0 to the EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch options.
If the EnableSuperfetch value does not appear in the registry, then disable the Sysmain service in Start -> Services.
5. Update the SSD firmware
This seems obvious, but some people overlook it. When we install an SSD in our computer we have to make sure that the firmware is up to date and thus can offer absolute performance. If we do not know if our SSD is up to date we have to go to the website of the manufacturer of our disk and look for updates available.
Manufacturers can upload updates of their products to their official websites, it is good that we are aware of that. To know the version we have of SSD (if you do not know), there are online tools that can provide you with that information. Once we know the version we have, we can see if there are new updates available and keep our disk updated.
6. Disable the search index of your SSD
By default, Windows makes an index in which it points in which area of our SSD each of our files is stored. This made a lot of sense when using slow, mechanical hard drives, but thanks to the SSD's read and write speed, it is no longer necessary to have it active, therefore, if you want to optimize your SSD, you will have to disable it.
How do you do this? Well, it is very simple. Enter "My Computer", find your SSD hard drive and enter "Properties" by pressing the second mouse button on it. At the bottom of the "General" tab you will find the indexing option, you just have to uncheck the box and apply the changes.
7. Disable Windows fast startup
When we put our laptop to sleep or close the lid, Windows saves the state of our activity in a small hibernation file. This means that every time we do it, we are spending read / write cycles of our SSD. Although the effect is not at all worrisome, in the long run it can affect the lifespan of the hard drive.
In this case you must decide. If you prefer a somewhat faster system resume in exchange for a bit of the life of your SSD, leave the fast boot option enabled. If, on the contrary, you are more concerned about lengthening, even if only a bit, the useful life of your SSD, then deactivate it. You can do it in Start -> Control Panel -> Choose the behavior of the start / shutdown buttons -> Change the currently unavailable settings. After that uncheck the option "Activate fast start" and press Save Changes.
8. Disable paging file cleanup
There are some options in Windows that are no longer necessary if we have an SSD disk. To increase the general performance of our computer, we can deactivate the cleaning of the paging file , as this does not improve the performance of our computer, due to the high speed of solid state disks, but it does consume write cycles.
Disabling it is as simple as entering the "Registry Editor" and looking for the following key: Computer \ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management. Set the “LargeSystemCache” and “ClearPageFileAtShutdown” values to 0. This doesn't speed up your SSD, but it will save you a good number of load cycles throughout its useful life.
9. Configure your SSD cache
To optimize your SSD and find the balance between life and speed, we recommend disabling the write cache. This option speeds up access to the data on the hard disk, but taking into account the read / write speed that is handled today, it is no longer necessary to keep it active, since all it does is consume read and write cycles.
To disable the SSD cache we have to enter its properties and select the Hardware tab. Click on your hard drive, click on properties and then on the option to change settings. Finally, deactivate the option "Enable write cache on the device" and click OK.
10. Check the status and speed of your SSD
How can we know if these changes are affecting the performance of our SSD or not? Well, my simple, measuring it through a reading and writing speed test. The best known program to do this is called CrystalDiskMark, and it is completely free. With it you can perform performance tests in a very simple and fast way. In this way, you can accurately check if all the changes made are serving to optimize your SSD or not.
As far as the longevity of your SSD for Windows is concerned, we can use tools such as CrystalDiskInfo or SSD Life , which provide us with technical information about the health of our hard drive. So we can check if our SSD is close to reaching its useful life or not. In any case, remember that an SSD disk can function optimally for at least 10 years, as long as we take good care of it and make normal and current use.
No comments:
Post a Comment