Tune Your SSD for Windows 10 - Part 2

 Apr 21, 2016

In my previous post I discussed some of the settings I have made to “optimise” my Surface 3 Pro and the wife’s laptop for Windows 10 on an SSD. Here are the rest of the settings:

Hibernate and Sleep: For most systems, Hibernate and\or Sleep can be beneficial – Hibernate saves the contents of memory and then shuts the system down. Starting up involves re-loading the memory and you can carry on where you left off. Sleep just turns off peripheral devices to reduce power usage, but memory contents are still maintained. This can be a problem in laptops and tablets though if the battery runs down – you may loose data, so for these devices I do not recommend Sleep in normal use.

In my case, my Surface Pro 3 has a default feature known as Fast Start, whereby it basically just logs you out and then hibernates the Operating System. For me with an SSD, the difference between Fast Start and just shutting down the machine normally is negligable, and with the travelling I do shutting down the machine is the preferrable option anyway, so it comes back to a personal choice. I have disabled hibernation in the past, and I have not noticed any real difference in startup times, and saved myself a few gigs of disk space. These days however, I leave Hibernation On, just in case I forget to shut down my Surface, but I have set the Hibernation interval to a reasonably large amount, 120 minutes for battery and 180 minutes for Plugged In. This results in reduced disk writes for no perceptible difference in performance, but also prevents my Surface from hibernating if I have not changed a slide for the last few minutes.

Hibernation can be turned off the way we have used in the past – via an elevated command prompt and the Powercfg –h off command (it can be turned on again with the Powercfg –h On command). In Windows 10 you can also turn on\off Hibernation (and Sleep) via the GUI. Open Control Panel and select Power Options. Select Change Plan Settings. Here you can change your Sleep settings – I have selected Never for both Plugged In and On Battery.

In the Change Advanced Power Settings window, under the Sleep section oddly enough, you have the option of changing the Hibernation intervals, and this is where I have set the intervals mentioned above. While you are in here, it might also be a good idea to check the options under Battery. This section determines what action is taken when the battery reaches certain levels – my Critical Battery Action was already set to Hibernate if the Battery reaches a critical condition (5%) and I would suggest that that is a good setting to have.

SSD TRIM: This is a feature of most SSD’s these days, and is a process which enables the SSD to automatically wipe the data marked for deletion clean so that it will speed up data writing. SSD’s have to wipe the data marked for deletion before it can be written on, but erasing takes more time; therefore TRIM makes more efficient use of the SSD storage and provides faster access times. The prerequisites for TRIM are: a BIOS/UEFI set to AHCI mode, an O.S. that supports the TRIM functionality (i.e. Windows 7 or above) and an SSD that supports the TRIM function. To check if TRIM is enabled, open an elevated Command Prompt and type .

Fsutil behaviour query DisableDeleteNotify

If DisableDeleteNotify = 0 then TRIM is enabled, if DisableDeleteNotify = 1 then TRIM is disabled.

If all the prerequisites are met and TRIM is disabled, you can enable it by simply typing:

Fsutil behaviour set DisableDeleteNotify 0

Thankfully my Surface Pro 3 had TRIM already enabled.

And now for some things that I have NOT implemented:

Windows Indexing: I have seen a lot of recommendations and utilities that suggest turning the Disk Indexing tick box Off for SSD’s, and yes I will conceed that indexing does generate more file writes, but the Search facility is such a major factor throughout Windows 10, that if you untick the Disk Indexing option at the bottom of the disk properties dialog box you will be forever getting popups and notifications that the search service is not working (especially if you are using your browsers and Cortana!). And SSD’s have improved their read\write and storage capabilities quite substantially over the last few years too. I have therefore left mine On, but you can untick the disk indexing option if you wish, or even turn the whole Windows Search Service Off and disable it in Services.msc, or if you are really picky, you have the option of adding and\or removing folders from the search index. Go to Control Panel and Indexing Options. I would find it interesting to see how long you can survive with Windows 10 Disk Indexing and Search both turned Off!

Paging File: Similar to Windows Indexing Service above, I have seen a number of recommendations to turn off the Paging File for SSD’s, but I have always been of the opinion here that with a very few exceptions, Windows knows best, so I tend to leave the default settings alone. At most, if I have a PC that has multiple HDD’s, I might move the page file to another drive other than the system drive, but again this is not necessarily optimal in all scenarios or for all applications. On the other hand I do have a policy of always making sure that all my PC’s have more than enough memory for what they intend to do, and this does make all the difference. As a case in point my Surface Pro 3, even with all the months of quite heavy and constant usage it has had, the page file is only 1.6Gb, and it actually has had very little overall useage (my Surface Pro 3 has 8GB Ram and 512GB storage ?, which is plenty for the normal business applications I use and most games - even some quite high end graphic utilities – I am writing this with my Surface attached to a large monitor running a resolution of 3,440 x 1,440; and my memory utilisation is just on 2.5Gb. And yes Elder Scrolls Online looks and plays great – provided I can ever get a chance to play it!).

O.K. So they are my settings to optimise my installations of Windows 10 on an SSD, do you have any other settings or suggestions you would like to add?

How do your Excel skills stack up?   

Test Now  

About the Author:

Gordon Cowser  

With over 22 years real world and training experience, Gordon is our most senior IT Infrastructure trainer. His expertise includes but is not limited to; Microsoft Server and Client OS, Messaging, Collaboration, Active Directory and Network Infrastructure. Gordon also specialises in SharePoint technologies training in both technical and end user aspects. With his extensive skill-set he brings a thorough mentoring capability to the classroom where he can advise on technical issues and challenges often beyond the scope of the course curriculum. A very approachable and experienced training professional, he has the ability to establish credibility fast with students at all levels.

Read full bio
top
Back to top