SSD Performance improvements

 

So you just bought yourself one of those wonderfully fast SSD Drives.  One little problem though.  They wear down over timpe. Another thing is you’ll start to get used to the speed very quickly and start getting annoyed at how slow it is.

It’s like upgrading your car from a buick to a supercar.  You’ll get used to the speed within a few weeks and actually start to get annoyed.  God knows that’s what happened to me.  It took about a month and now I’m severely annoyed at how slow my computer is.

I run a Macbook Pro using Bootcamp connected to a Pegasys R6 Drive array over thunderbolt. Go figure that I would be annoyed about this, but it happens.  The SSD is just too slow.nd

I decided to buy the Pegasys Array to speed up the system and even maxed my RAM out to the full 16 GB.  Did it do much for  me?  Not really.  I didn’t notice much of a speed increase.

So I went on a quest on how to speed up my computer performance under windows 7.  What did I find?  There are tons of little hacks I can do to make it better, but overall, it’s still slow.  I did improve performance about 20% and increase the life of my SSD.

So here are the tips:

Browsers: A necessary evil, but they store temporary internet files on your disk.  Disk Access = Slow (even on an SSD).

I will address two browsers here:  Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Firefox: In the address bar, type:   “about:config” and search for the following key:  “browser.cache.disk.enable”  You’ll notice it says true.  Simply, just change it to false and restart the browser.  Now, all those horrible temporary internet files are stored in RAM.  Much faster than an SSD and this is a good thing.

Internet Explorer: Ahh yes.  The fun wonderful browser that just seems to be a pain in the backside for everyone.  There’s a way to make this faster too!  If you’re lucky enough to have tons of RAM, do the following:

Get yourself a RAMDRIVE.  I set mine up as the “T:” drive and gave it 4 GB of space.  It makes a difference.  Now, I went overkill considering I’ll never use the full 4 GB, but with photoshop loaded up and about 37 JPEGS from my Nikon D300 @5-10 MB a pop, it adds up.

I use: DATARAM RAMDISK PRO, because it’s a kernel mode driver.  HD-TUNE Benchtests show almost 4GB per second in performance.  When test to and from the Promise R6 array (running RAID 5), I’m pushing 754 MB per second.  Not bad, huh?

Now, let’s get back to the subject and move our internet explorer temporary files folder there.

1. Install RAMDISK PRO and Setup your RAMDISK
2. Format it NTFS in Disk Manager
3. Start Up Internet Explorer
4. Go to Tools / Options
5. Under Browsing History, click on the Settings Button
6. You’ll see the Move Folder button.  Just click it and select your RAMDRIVE.
7. Reboot Your Machine when Prompted.

I’ve enclosed the screenshots so you can follow along.

If you’re lucky enough to have a Thunderbolt Drive, I would highly suggest adjusting your pagefile to 200 MB on your System Drive and set up a nice sized page file.  On a Pegasys R6, you’re going to swap in and out of the pagefile much faster than the SSD.

Also setting up a Pagefile in the RAMDISK makes a huge difference as well.  Now you’re talking 3500-ish MB per second.  Definitely faster than the SSD.  The reason to keep a small page file on your system drive is in the event the other devices aren’t available, you’ve still got one. I’ve included screenshots in this post so you can follow along.

These two little tricks will definitely help you prolong the life of your SSD.

[nggallery id=5]