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I recently brought an OCZ 64GB SATA-II SSD. I brought it because my laptop's battery life was poor, I did not want to buy a new one until my current one is five years old and buying it is a cheaper solution than buying a new laptop specifically customized for long battery life.
The specifications for SSDs typically place their power draw (regardless of whether they are in use or not) as being greater than that of mechanical hard drives, but when a mechanical hard drive is in use, the power draw is easily an order of magnitude greater than that of a SSD. I noticed that my laptop was accessing the hard disk every few seconds, so I expect that my new SSD will be better in terms of power draw when those accesses occur. Also, I expect that the lower latencies and higher bandwidth of my SSD will make me more productive when I am working, so while the battery life might not improve significantly, the amount of stuff that I can do in that time span will.
I plan to use my SSD for something like the next 20 years, for two reasons. One, is that its performance is so good that I would be insane to let it collect dust after I retire my current laptop. Two, it cost so much money that I feel the need to justify that expenditure and I intend to accomplish that through using my SSD for an absurdly long period of time. Given how cheap SSDs will be in the future because of early adopters like me, I will likely have second thoughts about this in 10 years, but that is the figure that I will go by for now.
Since I plan to use my SSD for so long, I was concerned that NTFS' last access time stamp updates would wear out my SSD before I retired it. I looked up the registry setting that controlled NTFS' last access timestamp updates (NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate) and found it in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
I had to create it as a DWORD value and set it to 0. While I was there, I also noticed NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation and Win95TruncatedExtensions. I used Google to discover what they did and I promptly executed an =^ 1 on both of them. I did not like how Win95TruncatedExtensions would make del *.htm delete .html files and I saw no need for DOS 8.3 names. I also really liked the possibly of getting better filesystem performance, as was mentioned in the pages on Microsoft's website that I had found via Google.
I made the changes and I rebooted my computer. With my SSD, Windows already booted very quickly, but with these changes, windows seemed to boot even faster. I had to restart a second time to verify my feeling that Windows was booting faster and I honestly believe that it does. If anyone using Windows XP wants better filesystem performance, I highly recommend making these changes (provided you do not use legacy software). These changes might also help on Vista, provided Microsoft did not already make them, which I doubt as Microsoft does everything it can for backwards compatibility, even to the point where it can be a bad thing.
Next, I would love to find a way to remove the Last Access Timestamp from being shown in the properties dialog, as I do not want to see stale information. I also am going to look into disabling the Windows prefetch, as it seems like a waste of space, CPU cycles, I/O and memory when one has an a SSD.
Any thoughts?
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The specifications for SSDs typically place their power draw (regardless of whether they are in use or not) as being greater than that of mechanical hard drives, but when a mechanical hard drive is in use, the power draw is easily an order of magnitude greater than that of a SSD. I noticed that my laptop was accessing the hard disk every few seconds, so I expect that my new SSD will be better in terms of power draw when those accesses occur. Also, I expect that the lower latencies and higher bandwidth of my SSD will make me more productive when I am working, so while the battery life might not improve significantly, the amount of stuff that I can do in that time span will.
I plan to use my SSD for something like the next 20 years, for two reasons. One, is that its performance is so good that I would be insane to let it collect dust after I retire my current laptop. Two, it cost so much money that I feel the need to justify that expenditure and I intend to accomplish that through using my SSD for an absurdly long period of time. Given how cheap SSDs will be in the future because of early adopters like me, I will likely have second thoughts about this in 10 years, but that is the figure that I will go by for now.
Since I plan to use my SSD for so long, I was concerned that NTFS' last access time stamp updates would wear out my SSD before I retired it. I looked up the registry setting that controlled NTFS' last access timestamp updates (NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate) and found it in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
I had to create it as a DWORD value and set it to 0. While I was there, I also noticed NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation and Win95TruncatedExtensions. I used Google to discover what they did and I promptly executed an =^ 1 on both of them. I did not like how Win95TruncatedExtensions would make del *.htm delete .html files and I saw no need for DOS 8.3 names. I also really liked the possibly of getting better filesystem performance, as was mentioned in the pages on Microsoft's website that I had found via Google.
I made the changes and I rebooted my computer. With my SSD, Windows already booted very quickly, but with these changes, windows seemed to boot even faster. I had to restart a second time to verify my feeling that Windows was booting faster and I honestly believe that it does. If anyone using Windows XP wants better filesystem performance, I highly recommend making these changes (provided you do not use legacy software). These changes might also help on Vista, provided Microsoft did not already make them, which I doubt as Microsoft does everything it can for backwards compatibility, even to the point where it can be a bad thing.
Next, I would love to find a way to remove the Last Access Timestamp from being shown in the properties dialog, as I do not want to see stale information. I also am going to look into disabling the Windows prefetch, as it seems like a waste of space, CPU cycles, I/O and memory when one has an a SSD.
Any thoughts?
More...
View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds