Apr 14, 2016

Yes I know there are any number of hard disk utilities out there in the marketplace that offer to “optimise” your SSD for you, but I like to see and understand what settings are being changed and why, so if you have 5 minutes or so to spare, you can follow along with me as I go through some basic and simple SSD settings I think are beneficial for Windows 10 (and the ones I have NOT enabled) on an SSD – in my case a Surface Pro 3. You might even save yourselves a few dollars not having to buy one of those sometimes quite expensive “tuning” utilities.

Like a lot of people at the time, I upgraded my Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10 when it was released in July last year, with everything running remarkably smoothly and error free - apart from a minor run-in with the world’s most unhelpful error message (“Something’s happened” and no other option but to close and shut down) – thankfully fixed by simply undocking my Surface and just having only the power lead and the Surface keyboard attached while I did the upgrade.

Roll forward to earlier this year, and I had just upgraded the wife’s laptop to a new you beaut SSD (the usual complaint – my pc is slow!), when I started thinking of the settings required to optimize Windows 10 for an SSD and decided to check my own settings. That is when I discovered that although the upgrade had ultimately gone through without error and has been working great since then - even after the latest updates from Microsoft, the disk settings were standardized for a normal hard disk, not an SSD.

Here then are the settings I have made to “optimise” my Surface 3 Pro and the wife’s laptop for Windows 10 on an SSD:

Defragmentation (called “Optimize Drives” in windows 8 and 10) – first off SSD’s do not need to be defragged – especially on a regular schedule. This is probably the quickest way to drastically reduce the expected life of your SSD and unfortunately for SSD users this is not only on but scheduled by default. This regularly scheduled defragmentation is unnecessary for SSD’s (data is not stored sequentially on magnetic tracks and SSD access times are much much faster than regular HDD’s anyway). You can do a manual defragmentation if necessary, but this an unlikely scenario. Defragmentation should therefore be turned off.

To open the Optimize Drives tool, simply type dfrgui in the search window (there are other ways such as right-click a drive in Windows Explorer, click the Tools tab, and then click the Optimize button – but dfrgui is quicker!). Here you can turn off the “Optimisation” entirely as I have done, or if you have multiple drives, you can choose which drives you want to Optimise, just turn it off for any SSD’s.

SuperFetch (and PreFetch). This is a system in Windows that tries to guess your next intended disk access and “Pre-fetches” that access and caches it in memory, the theory being it will speed up your overall throughput. For most systems, this works well for sequentially accessed files such as videos, but can have little benefit for files that are using a lot of random access such as games. Again, think of the access speed of SSD’s. Therefore this caching is again unnecessary for SSD’s and should be turned off.

Turning off Superfetch and Prefetch is a 2-step process – first access your services tool (services.msc), find the Superfetch service, stop it and then set the startup type to disabled. Then open regedit, and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

In the PrefetchParameters, in the right hand window there should be a key called EnablePrefetcher, and, if you have not already turned off Superfetch in Services.msc, you may find a Superfetch key as well. If it is there ignore it - it should dissappear when you disable the Superfetch service, and reboot your machine). For the EnablePrefetcher key, set the value to 0. The actual values are as follows:

• 0 – Disable Prefetcher
• 1 – Application launch Prefetching enabled
• 2 – Boot Prefetching enabled
• 3 – Application launch and Boot Prefetching enabled.

By the way, if you have already turned off Superfetch and wish to turn it back on for a certain application, you add the special switch /prefetch:1 to the program shortcut.

I will be discussing more settings in my next post, so make sure you look out for it!