Firstly I’d like to wish all our readers a Happy New Year and I thank you for all following and supporting this website.
Last year when Windows 7 was released, it arrived with full support for Solid State Drives. At the time however they were in little use but we did see some examples of how quickly Windows 7 could boot up using SSD drives by taking advantage of the technology.
But as I mentioned above, not many people were able to take full advantage of SSD’s, but now Corsair Memory and OCZ Technology Group, two of the leading suppliers of DRAM- and flash-based memory used in the making of solid-state drives (SSDs), have issued firmware updates to add a feature that will boost the performance of Windows 7 on a SSD.
This feature is known as “TRIM” Windows 7 shipped with support for this feature but none of the SSD’s at the time supported it. Intel did release a TRIM update in August but it had to be withdrawn due to data corruption issues.
The problem with SSD’s is that overtime their performance degrades. That’s because unlike a traditional hard drive, when you delete data from an SSD, the contents in the cells aren’t truly deleted, but are rather marked as being disposable and can be overwritten. So when new data is written, the old data had to be physically deleted first. As a result the drive would take longer to write data.
This “TRIM” update prevents this from occurring. When you delete data, it actually deletes it and frees up the cells for immediate data writes. This is done when the drive is not otherwise in use. It’s one of the many features that Microsoft were working on under the hood of Windows 7.
The OS also disables disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching when an SSD boot drive is detected. All of these technologies were designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could be a bottleneck. On an SSD, random read speed is its forte.
Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes toreduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs
Wrote Michael Fortin on the Microsoft engineering blog
Both Corsairs and OCZ’s updates require a full disk format. Intel re-released its update in December but made no mention of a full disk format, but they do recommend you backup your data.
Do any of you guys use Solid State Drives with Windows 7? Have you noticed any significant increase in performance?
Let us know in the commments
Source:
Two mistakes noticed:
timesupported
prefetchingwhen
Apologies, corrected
Yeah I use an SSD, but I installed W7 around late September before it was fully released and grabbed the RTM off torrents and it’s been running since. My boot up times are under a minute and programs load much faster than a traditional HDD and without the loud noise of the seeking that they have. It’s only a 32GB and now I wish I had bought a 64GB now.This is my drive I’m using: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609392
I have an Intel X25-M 80 Gb (G2). Win 7 original driver and no toolbox installed. Fast as hell!
Yup!! OCZ 30G SSD on Win 7 Ultimate. The boot times went from 40 seconds to 12 seconds. Measured it dozens of times. No typos here! The SSD was by far the very most cost effective speed up I ever have done to any PC. I have been computing since Commodore 64′s were bleeding edge technology. Yeah I’m old – 59. May I add something to correct a common misconception on the application of a SSD. They are NOT intended as storage devices. The intent is to have your OS and Program Files on the SSD as your primary boot drive. All your data and media files go on your HDD storage. You CAN of course use an SSD for storage and they will work fine but it’s like owning a Porsche and never really driving it!
What would be considered as a SSD …i have a Seagate Momentus 5400.5 250 gb. would this be an ssd drive?please email me back.
lol!
An SSD is a Solid State Drive, not a spinning platter drive. You have a 2.5″ Seagate 250GB spinning platter drive, spinning @ 5400 rpm with an 8MB cache. Usualy found in laptops and selling for about $60. An equivilant capacity SSD will set you back around 10x that amount.